baptiste_m4in

After reading through the replies, it has come to my attention that I have missed a few things. SpaceX actually gave some measurements in the render below. It seems like the radiators are actually ~5.5 × 10 meters, giving them an area on one side of ~55m. The thermal radiation from the Earth is about 230 w/m², which gives about 50KW of extra thermal energy to deal with. I still think this is probably a bit of an over-estimate, but I want to make sure I'm not lowballing numbers. The radiators use a heat pump and I'm going to be bold and assume that they could reach as high as 100°C (374.15°K). I have also boosted the emissivity to 0.95. New Equation: Area = (150×10³ + 50×10³) / (0.95 * 5.67×10⁻⁸ × (343.15 - 2.7⁴)) = 267.786 m² Divide by four for the area of one radiator: 66.946 m² Divide by 5.5 for radiator length: 12.17 m² long 12.17 meters is still 2.17 meters too long but it's just so close that I can't really call this proof that this design won't work. If the engineers at SpaceX could make the heat pump a bit more effective than my estimates, just increase the length of the radiators by a small amount, or if the radiation from the Earth is smaller than I thought, then it would work.