system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does heat from a spaceships engine radiate away in space?

Say I built a nuclear powered spaceship in my back garden, and could fly around Earth just fine.  Would the engines / reactor cook me inside the cabin once I reached space, as the heat generated has nowhere to go?

edit.  This post really *took off* (ha!)  Appreciate all the replies and discussions it's generated!
gpt
Two of the important ways to shed heat in our atmosphere (conduction and convection) don't work in space. This leaves just a single heat transfer method: radiation. All objects emit electromagnetic radiation, with the amount (and wavelength) depending on the temperature of the object.

So your spaceship does have a way to get rid of heat, but it'll be far less effective than it would be sitting in your back garden. So despite space being very cold, heat can be a bigger issue than it is on Earth. So heat management is an important area of interest when it comes to designing satellites and other things that go into space.

One of the ways to help cooling is to create a system that moves the heat from the interior parts of the craft to the outer walls of the space craft. The hotter you can make the outer walls, the more cooling you get through radiation.