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Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. (taranis.ie)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Granted I never made it further than freshman level physics in college but doesn’t heat needs a media to radiate away. Otherwise it just stays in place? So there would be nothing to move the heat away from installation? The ISS uses these big radiators the emit the waste heat as infrared light. That seems like a plausible method to exhaust waste heat. But I don’t have any clue if that can scale up to the level of a huge data center compared to the systems on the ISS

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Heat is energy as "vibration of molecules". It spreads to adjacent molecules by conduction, unless we have other interesting things going on. Easy stuff.

    Vacuum is the absence of molecules to conduct heat to.

    Wait...

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Yes, ISS radiates heat to space. The total ISS power burden and by extension heat dissipation need is less than a lot of these GPU racks. They need big radiators just for that. Imagine ISS sized radiators per rack of equipment, how for apart the equipment would have to be, how much more mass cost for launch that is, etc etc...

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