[foobarian]

Pardon, but the question of "could the operational cost be smaller in space" is almost not touched at all in the article. The article mostly argues that designing thermal management systems for space applications is hard, and that the radiators required would be big, which speaks to the upfront investment cost, not ongoing opex.

[andrewflnr]

Ok, sure, technically. To be fair you can't really assess the opex of technology that doesn't exist yet, but I find it hard to believe that operating brand new, huge machines that have to move fluid around (and not nice fluids either) will ever be less than it is on the surface. Better hope you never get a coolant leak. Heck, it might even be that opex=0 still isn't enough to offset the "capex". Space is already hard when you're not trying to launch record-breaking structures.

Even optimistically, capex goes up by a lot to reduce opex, which means you need a really really long breakeven time, which means a long time where nothing breaks. How many months of reduced electricity costs is wiped out if you have to send a tech to orbit?

Oh, and don't forget the radiation slowly destroying all your transistors. Does that count as opex? Can you break even before your customers start complaining about corruption?

[wat10000]

Maintenance will be impossible or at least prohibitively expensive. Which means your only opex is ground support. But it also means your capex depreciates over whatever lifetime these things will have with zero repairs or preventive maintenance.

[verzali]

But ground support will not be cheap. You need to transfer a huge amount of data, which means you need to run and maintain a network of ground stations. And satellite operations are not as cheap as people like to think either.