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advisedwangtoday at 4:23 PM1 replyview on HN

The hotter you are, the less radiators you need for the same heat dissipation. The ISS needs to run at human-comfort temperatures, but a datacenter can run much hotter than that (note the "at 60 °C" in the article). I forget the scaling parameter, but it's like T^2 or T^4 or something like that, so running hotter makes a huge difference.

Of course, that's offset by the enormous heat output of a datacenter. I'm not saying it's viable, just that you actually need to do the math instead of eyeballing the ISS radiators.


Replies

ck2today at 5:10 PM

I am curious to see if this causes an improvement in radiators though, that would be interesting

or perhaps a whole new technology invented to vent the heat

will be interesting to see what they come up with

hmm, how do they radiate the heat from the capsule with humans going to the moon, now I am really curious, I've never seen panels like that on the lunar module past or future