alt Hacker NewsI worked in aerospace for a couple of years in the beginning of my career. While my area of expertise was the mechanical design I shared my office with the guy who did the thermal design and I learned two things:
1. Satellites are mostly run at room temperature. It doesn't have to be that way but it simplifies a lot of things.
2. Every satellite is a delicately balanced system where heat generation and actively radiating surfaces need to be in harmony during the whole mission.
Preventing the vehicle from getting too hot is usually a much bigger problem than preventing it from getting too cold. This might be surprising because laypeople usually associate space with cold. In reality you can always heat if you have energy but cooling is hard if all you have is radiation and you are operating at a fixed and relatively low temperature level.
The bottom line is that running a datacenter in space makes not much sense from a thermal standpoint and there must be other compelling reasons for a decision to do so.
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They address that issue in the link; The propose a 63m^2 radiator for heat dissipation.
The caveat to this is that that this also dependent on where in the lifecycle of the satellite you are at. For example after launch, you might just have your survival heaters on, which will keep you within generally an industrial range (e.g. >-40c), and you might not reach higher temps until you hit nominal operations. But a lot of the hardware specs for temperature often are closer standard "industrial" specs rather than special mil or NASA specs.
What is room temperature in this context? The temp of the space it's sitting in or a typical room temp on Earth?
Lay people associate space with cold because nearly every scifi movie has people freezing over in seconds when exposed to the vacuum of space (insert Picard face-palm gif).
Even The Expanse, even them! Although they are otherwise so realistic, that I have to say I started doubting myself a bit. I wonder what would really would happen and how fast...
People even complained that Leia did not freeze over (in stead of complaining about her sudden use of the force where previously she did not show any such talents.)
It's like a thermos flask where the spaceship is the contents and space is the insulating vacuum.