I am just honestly confused. There seem to be no logical reason for it, except that it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
I am just honestly confused. There seem to be no logical reason for it, except that it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Direct solar, easy heat dissipation, SpaceX stock price
“easy heat dissipation” lol there is nothing easy about getting rid of heat in space.
You can just wait but it’s slow
Overheating is a massive issue outside the atmosphere. There’s no passive airflow to transfer heat through convection and there’s no air at all to utilize conduction. The only method left is radiation - the mechanism that let’s you feel the heat of a fire from the side. That’s the slowest option of them all.
Space is not cold in any sense of thermal management because space is essentially empty. Representations of people/fluids freezing when evacuated into space isn’t a good representation of actual thermal management. While there is some freezing effect, it’s because the rapid vaporizaiton of water cools the remaining water and can go below the freezing point. But, realistically, bodies don’t really freeze to an appreciable degree. Meanwhile, for everything else not containing water, there’s nothing to cool it down. In fact, of the very few particles that are flying around, they’re actually quite hot. Atoms flying for millions of years are still over 20,000 degrees.
So no. Thermal management makes orbital data centers the actual worst option.
The heat radiation is actually significant, but still stupid for data centers (high power density).
Those particles flying around are very easily many many orders of magnitude hotter than 20’000 K/°C/°F. To convert average kinetic energy to temperature via the kinetic theory of gases: T = 2E / (3 * k_B) k_B = 8.6E-5 eV/K So roughly T = 7736E Example with 1 TeV: 7736 * 1 TeV (1E12) = 7.7E15 Kelvin
Even solar wind is ~1’000 eV and thus well above 1 million Kelvin. Wiki has a nice graph of amount of particles vs. their energy here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray
1 TeV is almost completely to the left of that plot and there is about 1 such particle every second per m². At the right side, around once per km² per year, with 1E19 eV the “temperature” is about 1E23 Kelvin. One(!!!) such particle has dozenz of Joules in energy.