radiators can be made as long as desirable within the shade of the solar panels, hence the designer can pracitically set arbitrarily low temperatures above the background temperature of the universe.
Yes, you can overcome this with enough radiator area. Which costs money, and adds weight and space, which costs more money.
Nobody is saying the idea of data centers in space is impossible. It's obviously very possible. But it doesn't make even the slightest bit of economic sense. Everything gets way, way harder and there's no upside.
In space or vacuum radiation is the best way to dissipate heat, since it's the only way.
I believe the reason the common person assumes thermal radiation is a very poor way of shedding heat is because of 2 factoids commonly known:
1. People think they know how a vacuum flask / dewar works.
2. People understand that in earthly conditions (inside a building, or under our atmosphere) thermal radiation is insignificant compared to conduction and convection.
But they don't take into account that:
1) Vacuum flasks / dewars use a vacuum for thermal insulation. Yes and they mirror the glass (emissivity nearer to ~0) precisely because thermal radiation would occur otherwise. They try their best to eliminate thermal radiation, a system optimized to eliminate thermal radiation is not a great example of how to effectively use thermal radiation to conduct heat. The thermal radiation panels would be optimized for emissivity 1, the opposite of whats inside the vacuum flask.
2) In a building or under an atmosphere a room temperature object is in fact shedding heat very quickly by thermal radiation, but so are the walls and other room temperature objects around you, they are reheating you with their thermal radiation. The net effect is small, in these earthly conditions, but in a satellite the temperature of the environment faced by the radiating surfaces is 4K, not a temperature similar to the object you are trying to keep cool.
People take the small net effect of thermal radiation in rooms etc, and the slow heat conduction through a vacuum flasks walls as representative for thermal radiation panels facing cold empty space, which is the mistake.
Just look at a car. Maybe half a square meter of “radiator” is enough to dissipate hundreds of kW of heat, because it can dump it into a convenient mass of fluid. That’s way more heat than the ISS’s radiators handle, and three orders of magnitude less area.
Or do a simple experiment at home. Light a match. Hold your finger near it. Then put your finger in the flame. How much faster did the heat transfer when you made contact? Enough to go from feeling mildly warm to causing injury.
its not exactly good advertisement for conductive or convective heat transfer if its really employing thermal radiation under the hood!
but do you want big tech to shit where you eat? or do you want them to go to the bathroom upstairs?
At some point I'm thinking the large resistance to the idea I am seeing in a forum populated with programmers is the salivation-inducing idea that all that datacenter hardware will eventually get sold for less and less, but if we launch them to space there won't be any cheap devalued datacenter hardware to put in their man-caves.
The resistance to the idea is because it doesn’t make any sense. It makes everything more difficult and more expensive and there’s no benefit.
It's you who didn't answer my question :)
Would you prefer big tech to shit where we eat, or go to the bathroom upstairs?
The reason I'm talking about computers on the ground using the atmosphere for cooling is because that's how things are done right now and that's the obvious alternative to space-based computing.
Why does it matter what I prefer? I'd love to see all industry in space and Earth turned into a garden. I'm not talking about what I want. I'm talking about the economics. I'm asking why so many people are talking about putting data centers in space when doing so would be so much more difficult than putting data centers on Earth. If your argument is that it's more difficult but it's worth the extra effort so we don't "shit where we eat," great, but that's the first time I've ever seen that argument put forth. None of the actual players are making that case.