eli5 – How is space cold?

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How is space “cold” when it’s a vacuum? Isn’t temperature transferred between mass? If anything, shouldn’t you overheat when in a vacuum, because your body generates heat?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Space is both very hot and very cold.

If your spacecraft is in the sun, it’s adding a lot of heat to it – at least on the side that is facing the sun. If there’s a part facing the earth and it’s daytime, you also gain heat from the light reflected from the earth.

If part of your spacecraft is facing deep space, you will be radiating energy back out to space and that will make that part cooler.

So you need to manage all of those different heat sources and heat losses, and it gets very complicated in practice. Many craft actually need radiators to get rid of excess heat both from the sun and from the electronics – both the ISS and shuttle had large radiators. Some craft will slowly rotate – usually known as a “barbecue roll” to keep the craft from getting hot on one side and cold on the other. Apollo did this when travelling to the moon.

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