zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
> In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries.

Sure. Now do cooling. That this isn't in the "key challenges" section makes this pretty non-serious.

A surprising amount of the ISS is dedicated to this, and they aren't running a GPU farm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...

>>ceejay+a7
Point solar panels away from the Sun and they work as rudimentary radiators :).

More seriously though, the paper itself touches on cooling and radiators. Not much, but that's reasonable - cooling isn't rocket science :), it's a solved problem. Talking about it here makes as much sense as taking about basic attitude control. Cooling the satellite and pointing it in the right direction are solved problems. They're important to detail in full system design, but not interesting enough for a paper that's about "data centers, but in space!".

>>TeMPOr+yl
Cooling at this scale in space is very much not a solved problem. Some individual datacenter racks use more power than the entire ISS cooling system can handle.

It's solved on Earth because we have relatively easy (and relatively scalable) ways of getting rid of it - ventilation and water.

>>ceejay+Vl
No, I meant in space. This is a solved engineering problem for this kind of missions. Whether they can make it work within the power and budget constraints is the actual challenge, but that's economics. No new tech is needed.

>>TeMPOr+Cm
> No new tech is needed.

Sure, in the same sense that I could build a bridge from Australia to Los Angeles with "no new tech". All I have to do is find enough dirt!

>>ceejay+qo
No, but building bridges is a good example - it's also a solved problem. Show civil engineers a river, tell them how much and what type of traffic needs to allow it, and they'll tell you it obviously can be done, they'll even tell you what structural elements will be needed and roughly how expensive they are. The problem to solve here isn't whether this can be done, but which off-the-shelf parts to use to make a design that you can afford.

We're past the point of every satellite being a custom R&D job resulting in an entirely bespoke design. We're even moving past the point where you need to haggle about every gram; launch costs have dropped a lot, giving more options to trade mass against other parameters, like more effective heat rejection :).

But I think the first and most important point for this entire discussion thread is: there is a paper - an actual PDF - linked in the article, in a sidebar to the right, which seemingly nobody read. It would be useful to do that.