> Well, it can’t use more than it can get from the sun that hits it. So it can’t need to radiate more than that away
You are correct that the first law of thermodynamics dictates the energy, but anyone who has parked a car in the sun will tell you, the temperature where the absorption/dissipation equilibrium is achieved is often incompatible with the survival of the cargo.
edit to your edit:
> Edit: ISS is about 90KW steady state, and the collector to radiator area ratio is about 5:1. Dunno about the mass ratio.
Cool; that's about half the wattage of one modern full-height Nvidia AI rack (172kW) - you need two ISSes to service just 1 rack; extrapolate that to a data center's worth of racks and see if the math is mathing. The ISS is about the size of a(n American) football field.
The average temperature of a rock, car, or the ISS in low earth orbit is about -18C.
Again, just to remind you, I didn’t claim space datacenters are economically rational.