- cross-posted to:
- space@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- space@kbin.social
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.
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.
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.