It’s doesn’t make sense saying space is cold. There is no matter in space, so there is no temperature at all, it’s completely isolated. Of course, there is actually matter everywhere in space and that matter is cold, but there is so so little it doesn’t make sense to even consider it
It’s more accurate to say that space doesn’t have a lot of easy access to external heat sources. Your local temperature is pretty much going to stay your local temperature without some significant effort being put into it. If you’re a rock, that’s cold. If you’re a spaceship full of humans and electronics that continually emit heat to operate, you’re going to stay pretty warm and shedding heat is an engineering problem that must be solved.
i mean there are stars around…
Sure, but unless you’re quite close to it and have the surface area of a planet, you’re not going to be catching a lot of that solar radiation. Some of the outer planets of our own solar system are very large, and very frozen, and unless you’re that big or bigger and that close or closer, so are you.
There’s an awful lot of space in between stars as well. So if you’re traveling anywhere, you’re spending a lot of time outside of ~10 AU from the nearest star. Solar radiation doesn’t play a big part out there.
“Hot” and “cold” in a conversational context is relative to the speaker. If the matter we’re talking about is your body, you’re gonna freeze (and other stuff). So yeah space is fucking cold.
You are not going to freeze because of the contact, you will freeze because your hot body is emitting light but unlike on earth, you won’t receive light back from your environment because there is no environment. You will end up sending all your energy out. If you were enbedded in a box with perfect mirrors around you, you would actually die from high temperatures
Oddly, space is cold but spaceships tend to get too hot. Engines/electroncs/people give off heat inside the ship which gets trapped. You move heat by conduction, convection, or radiation, but because outside is a vacuum you cant disapate heat with the first 2 and are limited to the least effective radiation so the heat builds up
Yep, you’re basically surrounded by a perfect insulator.
Yeah, a little known fun fact about the Shuttle is that the radiators were on the inside of the bay doors. On achieving orbit they had 4 hours to get the doors open or they would have to scrub the mission before the electronics overheated. The doors never failed and no mission was ever scrubbed for this reason though.
