It’s not that complex in principle: you use really big radiators.
If you look at https://www.starcloud.com/’s front page video, you see exactly that. What might look like just a big solar array is actually also a big radiator.
AFAICT it’s one of those things that works in principle but not in practice. In theory you can make really cheap space solar and radiator arrays, and with full reuse launch can approach the cost of propellant. In practice, we’re not even close to that, and any short term bet on it is just going to fail.
Skimming Starcloud’s whitepaper: They say the radiators are “held at 20 C” without mentioning at all how they’d actually do that. For effective heat distribution you need fluid and small tubes, which are very prone to micrometeorite impacts, which means you need a lot more shielding mass. If you don’t have effective heat distribution your chips get too hot.
We have lots of examples of radiators in space (because it’s approximately the only thing that works), and AFAIK micrometeor impacts haven’t been a dealbreaker when you slightly overprovision capacity and have structural redundancy. I don’t expect you’d want to spend too much on shielding, personally.
Not trying to claim Starcloud has a fully coherent plan, ofc.
It’s not that complex in principle: you use really big radiators.
If you look at https://www.starcloud.com/’s front page video, you see exactly that. What might look like just a big solar array is actually also a big radiator.
AFAICT it’s one of those things that works in principle but not in practice. In theory you can make really cheap space solar and radiator arrays, and with full reuse launch can approach the cost of propellant. In practice, we’re not even close to that, and any short term bet on it is just going to fail.
Skimming Starcloud’s whitepaper: They say the radiators are “held at 20 C” without mentioning at all how they’d actually do that. For effective heat distribution you need fluid and small tubes, which are very prone to micrometeorite impacts, which means you need a lot more shielding mass. If you don’t have effective heat distribution your chips get too hot.
We have lots of examples of radiators in space (because it’s approximately the only thing that works), and AFAIK micrometeor impacts haven’t been a dealbreaker when you slightly overprovision capacity and have structural redundancy. I don’t expect you’d want to spend too much on shielding, personally.
Not trying to claim Starcloud has a fully coherent plan, ofc.