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by wongarsu 180 days ago
It's definitely a solvable problem. But it is a major cost factor that is commonly handwaved away. It also restricts the size of each individual satellite: moving electricity through wires is much easier than pumping cooling fluid to radiators, so radiators are harder to scale. Not a big deal at ISS scale, but some proposals had square kilometers of solar arrays per satellite
1 comments

That exactly. It's not that it's impossible. It's that it's heavy to efficiently transport heat to the radiators or requires a lot of tiny sats, which have their with problems.