Comment by ubercore
18 hours ago
I just skimmed that linked paper. Only mention I found of cooling is:
> Cooling would be achieved through a thermal sys- tem of heat pipes and radiators while operating at nominal temperatures.
Isn't that drastically underselling potentially one of the harder parts of this whole endeavor?
> Isn't that drastically underselling potentially one of the harder parts of this whole endeavor?
Everything in space is hard; but these are Alphabet researchers not NASA researchers, and honestly even the NASA papers I've been skimming through have a lot of simplifying assumptions in them, so that's not something to hold against them here.
They are just saying when they think it's worth considering, after all, not giving a detailed all-aspect proposal for how to make one.
I view articles like that as a kind of roleplaying, essentially. The authors are pretending to be space hardware engineers, but the results are not remotely realistic.
Very drastically, the ISS solar panels can generate up to 120kW of power, look at the size of its radiators needed to cool it down.
Scaling that to the hundreds of GW range is quite laughable.
https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2064108916611420273?lang=...
While I'd suspect the design is still in flux, the current design is for a 120kw satellite with 110 square meters of radiators. Scaling to hundreds of gigawatts is intended to be by repeatedly launching smaller designs.
300GW / 120kW = 2.5 million satellites, I don't think SpaceX can launch 2.5 million satellites. Even less keep replenishing all the ones needing decommissioning after 3-5 years, no maintenance can be made, so on and so forth.
It's ridiculous anyway you cut it, it's a pipe dream.
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