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Stephan
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"Optimistic yet technically feasible" is exactly how a chatbot hedges when it lacks the variables for a real physics simulation. ChatGPT ran a basic emission formula. It completely ignored the fact that this satellite will be absorbing massive amounts of infrared heat from the planet directly below it.
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If you put the satellite specs into ChatGPT 5.5 pro, it will just do the math for you. It plainly states that the plan is optimistic yet technically feasible. Imagine being a supposed scientist and engineer yet refusing to accept evidence on ideological grounds. Total loser.
JerryRigEverything@ZacksJerryRig
This is funny because those nuclear reactors in space were allowed to internally hit 3,272°F while radiantly shedding 150kw worth of heat. Elon plans on shedding the same amount of heat - 150kw, while keeping his processors at a cool 140°F. A satellite component at 140°F (333 K) radiates roughly 1,000 times less heat per square inch than that reactor core. Meaning Elons' radiator would need to be 1,000 times larger to actually work. **The radiator would need to be the size of a football field** The radiator alone would be roughly as big as the international space station. And thats not including the solar panels or AI computers yet. It'll never work. But sure - give @elonmusk your life savings for the SpaceX IPO. Hes never lied before....
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You let an AI chatbot do your math, which is exactly why you failed. Your 143 kW calculation assumes a magical, perfect deep space void. This satellite is going to Low Earth Orbit. The Earth fills half the sky, acting as a massive radiator that blasts the panels with intense infrared heat and reflected sunlight. You do not get a perfect double sided shadow. You get half of that area if you are lucky. The math you proudly pasted only works if the sun and the planet do not exist.
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Wow, a phone teardown expert tries to school SpaceX aerospace engineers.
@ZacksJerryRig should stick to tearing down phones 📱
The flaw in your take: You nailed that 140°F radiates ~1,000x less per square inch than 3,272°F….
HOWEVER
You forgot area is adjustable.
Ever heard of the Stefan-Boltzmann law: Power = emissivity × constant × Area × Temp(K)^4
Using Grok we can fill in the math here.
To reject 150 kW at lower temp, you make the area bigger. That’s the entire point of a radiator panel.
Per the numbers: A 110 m² double-sided panel at 140°F with standard space coating radiates ~143 kW.
Satellites routinely deploy large radiators for exactly this.
No laws of physics are broken here.
Your “football field / ISS sized” claim is a wild exaggeration.
A 110 m² panel is manageable with Starship. The Soviet reactors were tiny hot systems for power generation; this is scaled waste heat rejection for compute.
Imagine telling SpaceX—the company with 10,000 satellites in space—how radiating heat in vacuum works.
SpaceX already uses Starlink V2 chassis bodies for conductive heat transfer.
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This assumes the satellite operates in pure deep space, which completely ignores the physical reality of Low Earth Orbit. The thermal background of LEO is nowhere near 3 Kelvin. Earth fills nearly half the sky and acts as a massive 255 Kelvin radiator. It actively blasts the satellite with intense infrared heat and reflected sunlight. You cannot claim the thermal efficiency of a perfect 3 Kelvin vacuum when a massive, warm planet is radiating heat directly back into your panels.
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Here’s what Jerry is missing:
Space isn’t just a vacuum, it’s a vacuum with a sink temperature of 3°K, so if you want to reproduce it on earth you don’t just pull a vacuum, you pull a vacuums in a container with 3°K walls.
And when you do that it becomes ~10x more efficient.
JerryRigEverything@ZacksJerryRig
@Austen They could pull a vaccum here on earth and prove it works within 24 hours. But they won't. Because it doesn't. All they have is an AI video. For sure give elon your life savings though. 👍
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A Starlink sheds a few kilowatts. This is a 150,000 watt supercomputer. You cannot scale an internet router into a flying furnace and expect the same physics to apply. The only derangement here is watching grown adults let a corporate logo completely blind them to basic math. Heat does not care about who built the satellite.
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I’m sure @SpaceX who has launched tens of thousands of high bandwidth, high power internet satellites has no solution for this…
Elon derangement syndrome is a nasty tragic disease.
JerryRigEverything@ZacksJerryRig
You know the reason your Stanley or Hydroflask is so good at keeping your water cold is because there's a vacuum inside the walls of the thermos. Heat can't conduct in a vaccum. And "radiated" heat is ineffective at the temperatures processors operate at. This satellite will be like plugging in your gaming PC without a CPU cooler. It'll be dead in minutes.
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@alexboge You wrote four paragraphs about cognitive bias but avoided the math. The ISS needs 340sqm of radiators to reject roughly 90kW. SpaceX claims 150kW in just 110sqm. JWST rejects mere watts at L2, not 150,000 watts in LEO. Space cooling is a science, and the math says this fails.
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A lot of people have already jumped on the technical errors here, and I’ll get to those. But what bothers me isn’t that he got the physics wrong - it’s that he was so confidently, publicly wrong without a moment’s hesitation. That’s the meta-failure.
JerryRigEverything has a very specific lane: destroying brand new phones on camera. People love it. It's genuinely entertaining. But that lane doesn't come anywhere near spacecraft thermal engineering, vacuum physics, or orbital systems design - and that's exactly where he planted his flag here.
And I get it, a little. He saw something posted by a company whose founder he clearly and passionately despises. That's a powerful bias trigger - it shortcuts the critical thinking path before it even gets started. Motivated reasoning is real and it gets everyone sometimes.
But here's what that shortcut cost him: he announced to 14 million subscribers that SpaceX engineers had missed something blindingly obvious - without taking 30 seconds to ask "Has anyone smarter than me already dealt with this problem?"
The answer is yes. Emphatically. Repeatedly. For 65 years.
Every satellite ever launched operates in vacuum. The ISS manages 100+ kW of heat rejection in vacuum. The James Webb Space Telescope radiates waste heat so efficiently it approaches 6 Kelvin. The entire discipline of spacecraft thermal engineering exists specifically to solve the problem he thinks nobody solved.
Confident ignorance driven by motivated reasoning - and it's a dangerous failure mode at 14 million subscribers.
[2/2 to follow]
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The heat from the sun travels through a vacuum to cook your shiny head and also sunburn it.
This is what scratching glass all day does to your IQ.
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@Phrankensteyn spacex wants to put out 150kW of continuous power, not 1kW. the real answer is ~540 square meters positioned perfectly 100% edge facing the sun to get 2 dark sides.
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Ok, this is kinda funny.
Just quick surface math:
For 1 kW continuous power in space you need ~4 m² solar panels. This power will ~100% end up as heat. Additionally, we have ~4.6 kW solar heat not transformed into power. Good operating temperatures for computer chips are 80° C. The space background temperature is 3 Kelvin or -270° C, so basically zero. Let's apply Stefan & Boltzmann:
Radioation power (Prad) = emissivity (e) * Stefan-Boltzmann constant (sigma) * surface (A) * temperature^4 (T)
Let's assume, we work in the shadow of the solar panels for the radiators with e = 0.9 and a target temperature at 50° C at the radiator surface (should be a reasonable delta to the chip surface for heat transport). The formula then is:
Prad/ (e * sigma * T^4) = A
50° C = 327.15 K
Applying numbers:
5600 W / (0.9 * 5.67*10^-8 W/(m²*K⁴) * 327.15^4) = 9.58 m²
So we need about 10 m² of radiators in the shadow of the solar panels. That's a 2*2.5 m² surface assuming we radiate to both directions. Should be doable. Especially considering that the solar heat of the solar panels would pass through parallel to the radiators, so the actual heat that needs the radiators is likely much lower and closer to the power actually used. The radiator doesn't have to be a plate. Could be a cylinder, too.
So, yeah, I think I have an idea how to cool a computer chip in space. And if I have it, SpaceX might have it, too.
JerryRigEverything@ZacksJerryRig
@PTrubey Prove me wrong then - put your gaming PC in a vaccum and let me know how that works out for you. 👍 ill even let you keep the CPU cooler attached 😂
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@AdrianDittmann SmallSats move 50W through solid metal. 150kW melts the silicon before the heat can even reach the cooling block. If you shrink an ISS radiator to fit a satellite, the panel must run so hot to shed the energy that the return liquid boils the processor instead of cooling it.
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Bro hates Elon so much that he forgot how heat from an object in space radiates entirely through infrared light, thus not needing a medium such as air or water.
This is also why the ISS doesn’t become an orbital pressure cooker.
JerryRigEverything@ZacksJerryRig
You know the reason your Stanley or Hydroflask is so good at keeping your water cold is because there's a vacuum inside the walls of the thermos. Heat can't conduct in a vaccum. And "radiated" heat is ineffective at the temperatures processors operate at. This satellite will be like plugging in your gaming PC without a CPU cooler. It'll be dead in minutes.
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I know I should do a proper treatment of the thermal management issue for orbital data centres, rather than just dunking on people who make silly sweeping statements and bad napkin calculations; but I’d rather not state firm numbers until I have time to sit down and check the work properly.
Asking an LLM to confirm your bias with calculations does not count.
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According to the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, shedding 150kW of heat from a 110m² double-sided panel forces the radiator to reach 71.7°C, which violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics because a 71.7°C radiator cannot physically absorb heat from the 40°C coolant loop required to keep silicon chips from melting.
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I do not blame Mr. Jerry for these posts at all. Everyone eats them all up. His X revenue payments must be great. I wish my bait game was this good.
JerryRigEverything@ZacksJerryRig
You know the reason your Stanley or Hydroflask is so good at keeping your water cold is because there's a vacuum inside the walls of the thermos. Heat can't conduct in a vaccum. And "radiated" heat is ineffective at the temperatures processors operate at. This satellite will be like plugging in your gaming PC without a CPU cooler. It'll be dead in minutes.
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Stephan retuiteado
When you’ve never heard of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. (Maybe it’s a consequence of the switch from incandescents to LEDs lol)
thereisnobeth@thereisnobeth
I've heard that the vacuum of space is actually really good at conducting heat so this sounds like a really good idea
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According to the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, shedding 150kW of heat from a 110m² double-sided panel forces the radiator to reach 71.7°C, which violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics because a 71.7°C radiator cannot physically absorb heat from the 40°C coolant loop required to keep silicon chips from melting.
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Not to be a bootlicker, but do people really think that SpaceX would invest a shit load of money into something if they didn't think it was going to work?
JerryRigEverything@ZacksJerryRig
You know the reason your Stanley or Hydroflask is so good at keeping your water cold is because there's a vacuum inside the walls of the thermos. Heat can't conduct in a vaccum. And "radiated" heat is ineffective at the temperatures processors operate at. This satellite will be like plugging in your gaming PC without a CPU cooler. It'll be dead in minutes.
English
According to the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, shedding 150kW of heat from a 110m² double-sided panel forces the radiator to reach 71.7°C, which violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics because a 71.7°C radiator cannot physically absorb heat from the 40°C coolant loop required to keep silicon chips from melting.
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I think Jerry 75% buys into his own bullshit & 25% knows that the more ridiculous stuff he posts, the more people will engage with it.
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According to the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, shedding 150kW of heat from a 110m² double-sided panel forces the radiator to reach 71.7°C, which violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics because a 71.7°C radiator cannot physically absorb heat from the 40°C coolant loop required to keep silicon chips from melting.
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H100s are rated to 90C. That's 194F, not 140F. The actual satellite design in your community note uses 110 m² of radiators, 2% of a football field. And the ISS cost $150B because humans live on it, not because radiators are expensive. You're 0 for 3.
JerryRigEverything@ZacksJerryRig
@ot_giwa Computer chips have to stay at 140F tops. The radiator would need to be the size of a football field for just one satellite. The international space station cost 150 billion dollars - AI satelites dont have that kind of budget my friend.
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