244

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

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

108 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

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

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.

this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023

244 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

58998 readers

3228 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS