zlacker

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+(OP)
so you're saying its possible

>>Discou+d
Not for “$5 million in launch costs” per 40MW compute unit. Sure, many things are possible with enough money, but their “Table 1” is a pretty bald-faced lie. Just the weight of 40MW’s worth of H100 GPU’s alone would be $200 million in launch costs on a Falcon Heavy. That’s before you even add on launch costs for solar panels or “magic” not-invented-yet radiator panels.

The first question isn’t whether it’s “possible” with enough money, it’s whether it could ever be within even an order of magnitude of “profitable”. The second question is why would you trust a company who provides these kinds of estimates with no reasonable explanation for these obvious massive discrepancies?

>>Discou+d
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.