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
It's solved for low power cooling.

We do not have a solution for getting rid of megawatts or gigawatts of heat in space.

What the sibling comment is pointing out is that you cannot simply scale up any and every technology to any problem scale. If you want to get rid of megawatts of heat with our current technology, you need to ship up several tons of radiators and then build massive kilometer-scale radiation panels. The only way to dump heat in space is to let a hot object radiate infrared light into the void. This is an incredibly slow and inefficient process, which is directly controlled by the surface area of your radiator.

The amount of radiators you need for a scheme like this is entirely out of the question.