Comment by NetMageSCW

Comment by NetMageSCW 3 days ago

1 reply

Well, there are the permanently dark crater bottoms that might contain water ice and are definitely very cold. Turn the water ice into thermal transfer fluid and drill (The Boring Company) cooling loops underneath and the try to heat sink into the very cold ground. I’m sure you could run the Data Center for months before you exceed the radiative heat dispersal available to the ground.

godelski 3 days ago

You don't need to but in a dark crater to use the ground as your sink.

Also you need to consider that the thermal conductivity of lunar regolith is quite low.

I'm not saying it's not possible but I am saying there's a lot of technical challenges that make naïve approaches not so simple. The reason doing things in space is hard is not just the difficulty of getting things up into space. It's that all the things you take for granted just don't work.

Oversimplification is a footgun. Or more accurately, in this case a foot taser (if you know why you've found one of the major challenges of doing anything on the moon and mars)