99
An in-space construction firm says it can help build massive data centers in orbit
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
99 points (90.9% liked)
Technology
76581 readers
2496 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Isn’t it incredibly difficult to shed heat in space since the only real way to move heat is radiation?
In the (fiction) novel Artemis by Andy Weir, which takes place in a city on the moon, they have a heat management system that seemed pretty cool. They convert heat to light, and radiate the light out into space. Not sure how feasible/scalable that is, but I thought the concept was cool.
If they can turn it into light why not turn it into energy to be used?
If I had to guess, maybe they had a surplus of energy and needed some way to dissipate excess energy. I read the book years ago though, so I don't really remember.
That's already how they do it. They pass heat onto radiators which radiate away the excess heat in infrared. It should be noted however that this is far less efficient than it is in an atmosphere.
Doesn’t that already happen with infrared radiation?
I suppose so. Maybe the concept could work with other forms of electromagnetic radiation too, and visible light was just the one used in the book. Idk, I'm no physicist 🤷♂️
There are some various ways. Radiators can be large and thin, and as long as the heat-sensitive part of the thing is kept cool it doesn't really matter how hot the rest of it gets.