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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Shameful to see this on Nvidia's site. They have real engineers and business prowess. This is really shaking my assumptions about the company.

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Why is this shameful?

Because it's crank science harvesting money from people who don't understand physics.

Heat is almost impossible to dissipate in space because there's negligible matter to take the heat away.

The "scam" part isn't the radiators, it's the launch price. Their whole cost estimate depends on a different company reducing prices at least 50x.

I'm inclined to think you're right, but I can't figure out one thing - the command module (apparently) in Apollo 13 got down to 38F without active heating. That's much colder than standard data centre rack temps.

In the example of a data centre, there would be considerably more heat generation than 3 astronauts, but, I would like to understand more. 38F is cold, so heat is clearly lost not as slowly as we might think.

The Apollo passive radiators can dissipate ~2500 Watts into space. With most systems shut down, only ~500 Watts was coming from the remaining systems and the astronauts bodies.

Cool, thank you. So I read this as fundamentally, the heat they dissipated far exceeded the heat they produced. Do you mind opining on what similar figures would be with modest passive radiators and a typical data centre rack heat output?

No idea what the passive radiators might look like (50x the size of Apollo?), but an Nvidia GB300 NVL72 uses 120,000 watts.

And yet heat is dissipated in space on a regular basis. It's physically possible with a huge upside. This is how progress happens.

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