cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54084710
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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Murdered by Words
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To be clear, they are absolutely possible. There’s nothing preventing them with today’s technology beyond cost.
That doesn’t make musks statements correct. You can’t “easily” cool things in space. Virtually none of the conventional cooling methods work as most rely on heat moving from hot thing to cold thing, that cold thing usually being air in the end. But in space, where there is only vacuum and no air, heat will just build up until whatever is heating it breaks.
As the original tweet said, you can still get rid of heat, but it’s much slower (unless you’re ejecting super heated material regularly) and is quite inefficient.
The best cooling solutions I've seen suggested is to use the waste heat to power an IR laser, and just dump gigawatts of power overboard. If you are primarily relying on solar power to keep the operation going the inefficiency doesn't really matter.
The inefficiency isn’t in the power consumption, it’s in material or time waste.
You can easily remove the heat if you dump it all into a material and then jettisoning that out. The problem is, you need to replenish that material quite often, and that becomes rather inefficient.
You can also radiate the heat out, but that takes a very long time unless you’re willing to utilize a relatively extreme amount of weight and material to that end. It is much much slower than in atmosphere.
An IR laser doesn’t really sound viable to me? They take a boatload of energy, and a huge part of laser design is dealing with the heat the laser produces. I don’t really see how you could a) collect the heat b) turn that into a way to power the laser and c) deal with the lasers heat output, that wouldn’t do more than dump a fraction of the needed heat.
That's what I mean about scale. If these things are large enough then you can have huge power plants connected to them, but this would be more a several mile across space station than a satellite. Which is why you would need a space elevator first. Help you probably don't even need the space station you could probably put all this processing on the counterweight asteroid. It might as well do something.
But we are decades if not centuries of being able to do that.