zlacker

Because it's crank science harvesting money from people who don't understand physics.

Heat is almost impossible to dissipate in space because there's negligible matter to take the heat away.

>>hidden+(OP)
I'm inclined to think you're right, but I can't figure out one thing - the command module (apparently) in Apollo 13 got down to 38F without active heating. That's much colder than standard data centre rack temps.

In the example of a data centre, there would be considerably more heat generation than 3 astronauts, but, I would like to understand more. 38F is cold, so heat is clearly lost not as slowly as we might think.

>>ryanis+F3
The Apollo passive radiators can dissipate ~2500 Watts into space. With most systems shut down, only ~500 Watts was coming from the remaining systems and the astronauts bodies.

>>xnx+O5
Cool, thank you. So I read this as fundamentally, the heat they dissipated far exceeded the heat they produced. Do you mind opining on what similar figures would be with modest passive radiators and a typical data centre rack heat output?

>>ryanis+h7
No idea what the passive radiators might look like (50x the size of Apollo?), but an Nvidia GB300 NVL72 uses 120,000 watts.

>>hidden+(OP)
And yet heat is dissipated in space on a regular basis. It's physically possible with a huge upside. This is how progress happens.

>>hidden+(OP)
The "scam" part isn't the radiators, it's the launch price. Their whole cost estimate depends on a different company reducing prices at least 50x.