zlacker

>>lawren+(OP)
Lots of funny comments here, but does anyone actually have a good argument against this idea?

It seems both ridiculous and obvious.

>>owenpa+Y3
To passively radiate a gigawatt of heat in space at 100C, you'd need a radiator with a (visible) surface area of 1 million square meters.

>>yorick+l5
so you're saying its possible

>>Discou+y5
1000000 m2 are a 1x1 km square. If we assume a 5mm copper sheet of that size it weighs 44512900 kg.

A kg in a heavy falcon costs ~1500 USD. So we land at 66 billion USD in launch cost for the copper alone.

I probably don't have to explain that building a radiator of that size in space isn't free either. And the stuff that gets the heat to those radiatoes is neither free nor lightweight either.

Yet cooling somehow costs them zero dollars.