> Cooling would be achieved through a thermal sys- tem of heat pipes and radiators while operating at nominal temperatures.
Isn't that drastically underselling potentially one of the harder parts of this whole endeavor?
Scaling that to the hundreds of GW range is quite laughable.
While I'd suspect the design is still in flux, the current design is for a 120kw satellite with 110 square meters of radiators. Scaling to hundreds of gigawatts is intended to be by repeatedly launching smaller designs.
It's ridiculous anyway you cut it, it's a pipe dream.
Like I said higher up, at this scale, if you want to make your own fantasy plan you can draw a contiguous ring filling a single orbit.
Now if we are talking about thousands or millions you have some real questions. Well cost was question to start with. But at millions satellites yeah there is clear issues.
Simple rule for numbers 1 gigawatt is 1 000 megawatts or 1 000 000 kilowatts... So math is pretty simple there in estimations.
Everything in space is hard; but these are Alphabet researchers not NASA researchers, and honestly even the NASA papers I've been skimming through have a lot of simplifying assumptions in them, so that's not something to hold against them here.
They are just saying when they think it's worth considering, after all, not giving a detailed all-aspect proposal for how to make one.
The idea that it makes sense to use moon based He3 compared to using thorium that is already mined in waste quantities is absurd. Thorium is free energy already and the machine that turns it into energy is simpler the any fusion reactor we can come up with.
Also, from other statements they're clearly copying Alphabet's study which said cost parity in 2035, if they can actually launch 370,000 tons and maintain their learning rate.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468
I love the snark here. Ugh. This will need a separate blog post for why it's stupid. At 20 ppb, even if we could fuse He3, that makes lunar regolith marginally less energy dense than firewood. Also, anyone with a fusion reactor can make He3, even highschool students with home-made fusors can already do this. I'll have to check sources and maths to make sure I've not missed something important about which would be cheaper, *currently existing* neutron sources like fusors or going to the moon, but regardless, we can't currently use this stuff for fusion and the moment we can we won't need to mine it.(I have not yet formed an opinion about non-fusion uses for He3).