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Comment on A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams

PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

NASA River has already successfully tested a carbon dioxide to oxygen conversion system.

mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/…/moxie/

nasa.gov/…/nasas-perseverance-mars-rover-extracts…

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

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0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social ⁨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.

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