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A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A book review on the latest Weinersmith creation. It’s true, there is so much we don’t know.

Just throwing this out there on this forum because missing technology is the problem that kills the dream of Mars, according to the authors.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

NASAs rover has already successfully tested a carbon dioxide to oxygen conversion system, MOXIE.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/instruments/moxie/

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-perseverance-mars-rover-extracts-first-oxygen-from-red-planet/

If they can do it on a rover, it's pretty trivial to scale that up to an industrial scale.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

MOXIE is a Scale Model for a Future Big MOXIE
To launch from Mars, a small crew of human explorers will need 25 to 30 tons of oxygen, or about the weight of a tractor-trailer! To make that much oxygen would require a 25,000 to 30,000 watt power plant. The Perseverance power system only provides about 100 watts, so MOXIE can only make a small fraction of the oxygen that a future "Big MOXIE" would need to make.

In the first link you provided, NASA themselves say we'd need a 25,000 watt power plant to scale that up. That's not trivial.

Again, what the authors are pointing out is that space colonization is probably scientifically possible, but will take a lot of research and then investment. MOXIE is a great tech demo, but its not a solution by itself.