Minutes of June 13 Oklahoma Space Alliance Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met June 13, 2026, at the Cyber Hall and Gaming Lounge at Norman Computers in Norman, Oklahoma. Attending were Adam Hemphill, Mark Deaver, Clifford McMurray, Tim Scott, Dave Sheely and Syd Henderson. Instead of our usual presentation of space news, Adam did a presentation on the viability of Data Centers in space. This meant there was no June Update.
Adam’s major presentation was Scott Manley’s YouTube presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80&t=27s (also available at https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1rxec49/is_it_really_impossible_to_cool_a_datacenter_in/ )
The problem is that cooling involves heat transfer, which can be done by conduction, convection and radiation. Conduction and convection do not work in a vacuum, so to cool the data center (which produces large amounts of heat) you need radiators of some type to have the surface area to radiate heat from the data center. You do have to pump heat from the data center to the radiators, which you can do if the radiators are cooler than the data center. But loss of heat by radiation is much more efficient at high temperatures , while data centers will not work at high temperatures.
Thus, you need a large surface area for the radiators, but you also have to be careful not to expose too much of their surface area to the sun. You will have to put them edge-on to the Sun while the solar panels are face on to the Sun, supplying the energy to run the data center. Of course, that energy is what is converted to the heat you’re trying to get rid of.
In addition, the spacecraft will be getting thermal radiation from the Earth, both through reflection from the Earth’s surface (during the day) and the Earth's own thermal radiation. For a spacecraft directly between the Earth and the Sun, this can amount to a third of the radiation from the Sun.
Manley does the rough calculations for a satellite that uses 20 kW of powers and it’s tricky but probably doable, but Musk is talking about 100 kW servers and that’s trickier, because we are talking about drastically increasing the size of the solar panels, hence also of the radiator panels. He calculates you will have to move 70 liters of water to the radiator panels per minute to remove 100 kW of heat, which means you are using extra energy to pump the coolant. Water is not the ideal coolant for this because it expands when it cools. (The ISS uses ammonia, which has its own problems, while the Russians use glycol).
We also watched a video with Elon Musk on this and also his proposed giant Tesla facility.
Kip went to the ISDC and did some reports, including on the UCF (University of Central Florida) Space Ideation Challenge. For more information, see https://business.ucf.edu/space-ideation-challenge/.
Minutes by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
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Minutes By OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Clifford Mcmurray
PO Box 1003
Norman, OK 73070
Webmaster is Syd Henderson.
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