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Originally Posted by Interdimensional Warrior
Radiators that rely solely on radiative transfer and conduction as thier method of removing heat require a large surface area, and in the absence of a gas or liquid to convect heat away the surfaces must not be arranged so that infa red emmenating from them is simply not reabsorbed into an adajacent surface.
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It doesn't make any difference. The Apollo Command and service modules I saw on the launch pad were not highly polished either, they were painted.
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Well then Houston, we have a problem. The radiator you describe would require a large surface area composed of fins or ribs arranged in such a way that the heat radiated from one surface would not simply be reabsorbed by an adjacent element. It would also need to be visable on the outside of the spacecraft to work with any efficiency, and always kept on the shaded side of the craft. SOmething stinks here, doesn;t it? The command module was POLISHED? Not the ones I saw on TV.
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Look at the attached image showing an Apollo CSM.
The body is metallic and reflective. The conical section at the front, the inhabited command module, is highly reflective, almost mirror-like.
The white band along the bottom end of the cylindrical section and the smaller white rectangles along the top of the cylinder just below the command module are the radiator panels. They do not have a problem of radiating their heat to an adjacent surface because they have no adjacent surfaces. They are on the outside of a cylinder facing into space. They run around the entire circumference of the spacecraft, so at any one time half of them are always on the shaded side of the spacecraft.