foobarian parent
I don't know about that. Look at where the power goes in a typical data center, for a 10MW DC you might spend 2MW just to blow air around. A radiating cooler in space would almost eliminate that. The problem is the initial investment is probably impractical.
>99.999% of the power put into compute turns into heat, so you're going to need to reject 8 MW of power into space with pure radiation. The ISS EATCS radiators reject 0.07 MW of power in 85 sq. m, so you're talking about 9700 sq. m of radiators, or bigger than a football field/pitch.
Yes, so?
Everyone keeps talking past each other on this, it seems.
“Generating power in space is easy, but ejecting heat is hard!”
Yes.
“That means you’d need huge radiators!”
Yes.
OK, we’re back to “how expensive/reliable is your giant radiator with a data center attached?”
We don’t know yet, but with low launch costs, it isn’t obviously crazy.
Now scale the radiator size for your 8MW datacenter.
How do you propose to get 10MW of heat from the computers out to the radiators?
Same way we’ve always done it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
I.e. pumps, just like on the ground.