[Beowulf] Server Sky - Internet and computation in orbit

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 04:26:33PM -0400, Peter St. John wrote:
> I'd love computation on the moon; just as good solar collection as orbit,
> but radiation shielding from craters. But what about cooling? The article
> sounded a bit glib. I'm thinking, unless there's appreciable available
> water, computing in space will be limited to low GHz because heat
> dissipation would be limited to IR radiation? There's no coolant in space,
> right? How do satellites deal with that?

The only hot spot is the sun, everything else is 4 K cold microwave
background. The hotter you are, the more power you can dump into
the ultimative heatsink (T^4, Boltzmann law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law ).

Shielding from the sun is easy, provided you can maintain
the reflective shield alignment.