[iancmceachern]

I am a mechanical engineer, I have a multi decade career doing exactly these kinds of thermal analysis.

This video is basically saying that cooking data centers in space is possible. It is.

The question is if it's better, in any way, to putting them on earth. It isn't.

The common misconception I see is that people think that space is cold like Antarctica is cold. It isn't. Antarctica is cold because there is lots of matter, very cold. Space is cold because there is no matter. No matter to put the heat into and take it away.

It's the same reason that a hard boiled egg takes minutes to cook in water, but 30 to cook in the oven. Now put it in a vacuum insulated thermos and see how long it takes to cook.

Radiation is the weakest of the three heat transfer modes. So much so that in engineering school we often cross it off as negligible compared to the other two (convection and conduction).

Do the heat transfer math yourself, let us know what you find.

One of the comments on the YouTube video you linked says it best. " The only reason to do this is if you have a company who's business is to get things into space".

[Dig1t]

You obviously didn’t watch the video, he literally does the heat transfer math using radiation only, it works just fine.

Instead of just stating “it won’t work” why don’t you actually do the calculation yourself and show why it won’t work?

Yes they have an incentive to put things in space, but it actually is a decent idea if they can execute on it the same way they did with Starlink. There’s huge demand for compute, many data center projects on earth are being scuttled because of NIMBYs and lack of power, there are no NIMBYs in space and a sun synchronous orbit means you can power them without batteries.

[iancmceachern]

This is a common problem I see. Trying to solve these problems in a vacuum. He makes a joke about that in the video.

This talk will help put it in perspective: https://californiaconsultants.org/event/energy-and-thermal-m...

In order to talk about these things we need to think about the power from the grid, all the way to the cooling water coming out. Not just talk about how we can calculate or optimize each little piece. Of course we can do that, it's the overall system we are talking about and need to understand.

Forest for the trees.

What do I mean by that here?

He does the calculations for 20 kW. Which sounds like a lot. It's only enough to cool one node, not one rack, one node, in a modern data center. The starlink satellite he referenced is viewed as the absolute most modern thermal design in a satellite.

Most data centers have 2000-5000 nodes and the hyperscalers have 100,000 or more.

So to replace a single data center we need 2000-5000 of these things up there, at a minimum, or one thing that is 2000-5000 times bigger.

And maintenance.

And the hardware gets obsoleted every few years.

Or you could just put it in the desert in Nevada. But we don't need rockets to get there.