Comment by fennecfoxy
10 hours ago
Well empty space has a temperature of roughly -270c...so that's pretty cold.
But I think what people/movies don't understand is that there's almost no conductive thermal transfer going on, because there's not much matter to do it. It's all radiation, which is why heat is a much bigger problem, because you can only radiate heat away, you can't conduct it. And whatever you use to radiate heat away can also potentially receive radiation from things like the Sun, making your craft even hotter.
> Well empty space has a temperature of roughly -270c...so that's pretty cold.
What is this “empty space” you speak of? Genuinely empty space is empty and does not have a clearly defined temperature. If you are in space in our universe, very far from everything else, then the temperature of the cosmic microwave background is what matters, and that’s a few K. If you’re in our solar system in an orbit near Earth, the radiation field is wildly far from any sort of thermal equilibrium, and the steady state temperature of a passive black body will depend strongly on whether it’s in the Earth’s shadow, and it’s a lot hotter than a few K when exposed to sunlight.