> I also strongly suspect, given some background reading, that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe).

You'd be wrong. There's a huge incentive to optimized radiator tech because of things like the international space station and MIR. It's a huge part of the deployment due to life having pretty narrow thermal bands. The added cost to deploy that tech also incentivizes hyper optimization.

Making bigger structures doesn't make that problem easier.

Fun fact, heat pipes were invented by NASA in the 60s to help address this very problem.

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zero_bias 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

ISS and MIR combined are not a "large market". How many radiators they require? Probably a single space dc will demand a whole orders of magnitude more cooling

	▲	cogman10 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		ISS cost $150B and a large factor driving that cost was the payload weight. Minimizing payload at any point was easily worth a billion dollars. And given how heavy and nessisary the radiators are (look them up), you can bet a decent bit of research was invested in making them lightweight. Heck, one bit of research that lasted the entire lifetime of the shuttle was improving the radiative heat system [1]. Multiple contractors and agencies invested a huge amount of money to make that system better. Removing heat is one of the most researched problems of all space programs. They all have to do it, and every gram of reduction means big savings. Simply saying "well a DC will need more of it, therefore there must be low hanging fruit" is naive. [1] https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/6116

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mike_hearn 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The ISS is a government project that's heading towards EOL, it has no incentive to heavily optimize anything because the people who built it don't get rich by doing so. SpaceX is what optimization looks like, not the ISS.

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cogman10 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> has no incentive to heavily optimize anything because the people who built it don't get rich by doing so.

Optimization is literally how contractors working for the government got rich. Every hour they spent on research was directly billed to the government. Weight reduction being one of the most important and consistent points of research.

Heck, R&D is how some of the biggest government contractors make all their dough.

SpaceX is built on the billions in research NASA has invested over the decades. It looks like it's more innovative simply because the USG decided to nearly completely defund public spending in favor of spending money on private contractors like SpaceX. That's been happening since the 90s.

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jeltz 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

By the same token SpaceX has no reason to optimize Starship. That is also largely a government project.

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b112 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a private company, is profit motivated, and thus has reason to optimize. That was the parent poster's point.

Starship isn't largely a government project. It was planned a decade before the government was ever involved, they came along later and said "Hey, this even more incredible launch platform you're building? Maybe we can hire SpaceX to launch some things with it?"

Realistically, SpaceX launches far more payload than any government.

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habinero 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Haha no. SpaceX survives entirely on money from the US government. It's always been that way.

	▲	s-y an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Where are you getting this from?
	▲	lightedman an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Entirely? lol not even close. Source: I am out of LEDs and LASERs and now handle aerospace solar for a private company. Guess who almost everyone in the private sector flies on?
	▲	thinkcontext an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A puzzling statement, could you explain? Most of their revenue now comes Starlink which is mostly private clients. Also it's trivial to look at their launch history and see they have plenty of private clients. For sure the USG is their most important client but "entirely" is flat out wrong.

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pineaux an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

that is true. They would have failed after their first failed launch. The US government saved them.