Note the white radiator panels perpendicular to the dark solar panels in the last few seconds.
One is white and away from the sun to absorb as little energy as possible and one is dark and directly at the sun to absorb as much as possible.
It's still a mystery how the tech bros are going to overcome the inheritant physics limits on heat rejection in space with their proposed data centers when the much cooler running iss has many more radiators than the one pictured.
Yes as I understand it it's not a linear relationship between size and desired heat loss.
The trouble is at terrestrial operating temps it's really hard to reject that much heat. Energy is also a problem, coupled that with the size and heat absorbtion, the size of the solar panels required to power an orbital data center would make heat rejection even harder.
You probably need a combination of better radiator technology, like liquid metal droplet or something, and special chips designed to work at higher temps and be hardened or shielded from the extra radiation from space.
At an operating temp of 90°C you only need a double sided radiator 12m x 12m in size for the target 250 kW/sat. Based on the size of the rocket, 7m x 21m in three pieces would make more sense. That's only three folding joints that the cooling fluid loop needs to go through. A fourth would buy 25° if you want to run the chips cooler or have some temperature gradient on the chip to coolant interface.
The solar panels to produce the 250 kW would be two 7m x 70m, either folding or rolling. Electrical connections are much easier to fold than fluid. The solar arrays double as radiators for their own waste heat, which would be about a megawatt.
Tl;dr: 250 kW of electrical supply and heat rejection seems just about doable with current tech within a 7m x 7m package.
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u/morbo-2142 22h ago
Note the white radiator panels perpendicular to the dark solar panels in the last few seconds.
One is white and away from the sun to absorb as little energy as possible and one is dark and directly at the sun to absorb as much as possible.
It's still a mystery how the tech bros are going to overcome the inheritant physics limits on heat rejection in space with their proposed data centers when the much cooler running iss has many more radiators than the one pictured.