Getting rid of waste heat is a huge problem in space. Vacuum is a great insulator because there’s no material to conduct heat away from an object.
The idea of space being “cold” has more to with pressure (or lack thereof) rather than temperature, because ideal gas law:
If you suddenly expose a pressurized container full of heated atmosphere to vacuum, you get a massive pressure drop and therefore also a massive temperature drop.
You can’t do this to cool a computer system in space - you would need a constant supply of some fluid or gas that you could just dump into space that would take the heat out with it.
I suppose you could use a heat pump to concentrate internal heat around the hull for radiation into space. The datacenter could “operate” (assuming we’re just running a Minecraft server lol) while in sunlight while actively cooling and buffering excess heat, then in the shade it could continue to cool off to a safe level using solar reserves or just sit idly.
Space is cold as fuck, might not be the worst idea
edit: from the article itself
Getting rid of waste heat is a huge problem in space. Vacuum is a great insulator because there’s no material to conduct heat away from an object.
The idea of space being “cold” has more to with pressure (or lack thereof) rather than temperature, because ideal gas law:
If you suddenly expose a pressurized container full of heated atmosphere to vacuum, you get a massive pressure drop and therefore also a massive temperature drop.
You can’t do this to cool a computer system in space - you would need a constant supply of some fluid or gas that you could just dump into space that would take the heat out with it.
In the shade, but that’s not always available in orbit. The ISS uses massive radiators to shed waste heat.
I suppose you could use a heat pump to concentrate internal heat around the hull for radiation into space. The datacenter could “operate” (assuming we’re just running a Minecraft server lol) while in sunlight while actively cooling and buffering excess heat, then in the shade it could continue to cool off to a safe level using solar reserves or just sit idly.