[kennywinker]

Well, how do you cool servers in space then?

Evaporative cooling is the way it happens down on earth - and that shuttles h2o molecules from dense useful clumps like aquifers and rivers to a less useful form spread out in the air. But evaporating h2o isn’t an option in space afaik - since there’s a shortage of air to take up the h2o. In fact I think radiative cooling is the only actual option in space.

[ACCount37]

Radiative cooling. When something gets hot, it begins to radiate that heat away - black body radiation.

Fucking hell - do you all think ISS is cooled by hopes and prayers?

Starlink V3 sats have to dump ~20kW of pure waste heat just to exist. Going from that to the stated 100kW is an engineering task, not some sort of impossible arcane rite.

[kennywinker]

The ISS isn’t supposed to be a profitable business, and it isn’t competing with terrestrial ISS’ that can use evaporative cooling.

[MrMorden]

That's the neat thing: you don't, or at least not in the megawatt range. A kilowatt can be done with radiative cooling but doesn't get you far with a hypothetical datacenter satellite.

[kennywinker]

So, somehow the servers can run hot in space without a problem?

[MrMorden]

No; if you try to do this you don't launch in the first place because the amount of servers required to be useful can't be cooled within your payload budget.

[kennywinker]

It seems like you are agreeing with me while sounding like you’re arguing with me… confusing.