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

submitted 11 months ago by meyotch@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Mars is actually full of oxygen. The surface is covered in oxidized iron, and trillions of tons of carbon dioxide makes up its atmosphere. Plus all the ice.

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

We can't breathe oxidized iron or carbon dioxide. We'd need to convert it into breathable oxygen and the mechanism would have to be foolproof and have redundancies. And that still leaves plenty of other problems.

But my main point was to everyone in this thread criticizing the authors for being pessimists. This isn't just naysaying or complaining. The authors are pointing out all of the necessary research we still have to do before a space colony can be feasible.

[–] PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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.

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 1 points 11 months 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.