How NASA Will Use Robots To Create Rocket Fuel From Martian Soil (ieee.org)

Engineers are building a prototype of a robotic factory that will create water, oxygen, and fuel on the surface of Mars. From a report: The year is 2038. After 18 months living and working on the surface of Mars, a crew of six explorers boards a deep-space transport rocket and leaves for Earth. No humans are staying behind, but work goes on without them: Autonomous robots will keep running a mining and chemical-synthesis plant they'd started years before this first crewed mission ever set foot on the planet. The plant produces water, oxygen, and rocket fuel using local resources, and it will methodically build up all the necessary supplies for the next Mars mission, set to arrive in another two years. This robot factory isn't science fiction: It's being developed jointly by multiple teams across NASA. One of them is the Swamp Works Lab at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, where I am a team lead. Officially, it's known as an in situ resource utilization (ISRU) system, but we like to call it a dust-to-thrust factory, because it turns simple dust into rocket fuel. This technology will one day allow humans to live and work on Mars -- and return to Earth to tell the story.

But why synthesize stuff on Mars instead of just shipping it there from Earth? NASA invokes the "gear-ratio problem." By some estimates, to ship a single kilogram of fuel from Earth to Mars, today's rockets need to burn 225 kilograms of fuel in transit -- launching into low Earth orbit, shooting off toward Mars, slowing down to get into Mars orbit, and finally slowing to a safe landing on the surface of Mars. We'd start with 226 kg and end with 1 kg, which makes for a 226:1 gear ratio. And the ratio stays the same no matter what we ship. We would need 225 tons of fuel to send a ton of water, a ton of oxygen, or a ton of machinery. The only way to get around that harsh arithmetic is by making our water, oxygen, and fuel on-site. Different research and engineering groups at NASA have been working on different parts of this problem. More recently, our Swamp Works team began integrating many separate working modules in order to demonstrate the entire closed-loop system. It's still just a prototype, but it shows all the pieces that are necessary to make our dust-to-thrust factory a reality. And although the long-term plan is going to Mars, as an intermediate step NASA is focusing its attention on the moon. Most of the equipment will be tried out and fine-tuned on the lunar surface first, helping to reduce the risk over sending it all straight to Mars.

Comments

With what???

[DanDD]

Oh look, NASA engineers are playing in the dirt. They might as well practice mining for gold in finely shredded cash.

So far the Orion capsule, just the capsule and it's service module mind you - not a rocket, not a long-term habitat, not a lander/ascent vehicle, just a capsule, will cost the US $18,000,000,000 (so far). That's eighteen BILLION. For a capsule. That will sustain life for a month or so. With diaper wearing astronauts inside.

From the link above, here's what that 18 BILLION isn't paying for:

These prior Orion costs:

1. Exclude costs "for production, operations, or sustainment of additional crew capsules, despite plans to use and possibly enhance this capsule after 2021"[105]
2. Exclude costs of the first Service Module and spare parts[106] to be provided by the European Space Agency for the test flight of Orion in 2020 (about $1 billion)[107]
3. Exclude costs to assemble, integrate, prepare and launch the Orion and its launcher (funded under the NASA Ground Operations Project,[108] currently about $400M[109] per year)
4. Exclude costs of the launcher, the SLS, for the Orion spacecraft

There are no NASA estimates for the Orion program recurring yearly costs once operational, for a certain flight rate per year, or for the resulting average cost per flight.

So this is basically a long-term Lockheed Martin/Boeing subsidy. The US taxpayer is buying something that nobody knows how much it will cost to operate or sustain. Boys and girls, this is what happens when politicians spend someone else's money with reckless abandon. If allowed to continue, congress will be raping your ability to retire in order to pay for THEIR retirement.

In comparison, the Falcon Heavy cost between 500 MILLION and 1 BILLION to develop. For something can can be launched far more cheaply (and re-used) the Saturn program ever dreamed of. SLS will do no better than Saturn. By the time the SLS Launcher, Orion spacecraft, habitats, and ascent/decent vehicles are designed and built, Lockheed and Boeing's cost will be in the TRILLIONS for a Mars mission, and decades will have passed.

It's time to stop throwing good money after bad and let the private sector do what it's good at, and let Lockheed & Boeing compete freely and fairly: they spend their own money to develop something, they present it, if it's good, someone buys their product or service. Enough free money, open-ended contracts and bonuses paid out for demonstrating nothing more that cost overruns and slipping schedules. Cancel Orion and SLS. If Uncle Sam wants space toys for the military, let it come entirely out of a Pentagon budget and not pollute NASA further. The shuttle was a disaster of merging civil space and military requirements that we don't need to repeat.

Sounds like Zubrin ...

[ninjagin]

... or more like "Mars Direct". Thank goodness. I may not be a huge fan of the idea of permanent settlement on Mars, or this "terraforming" nonsense, but basic exploration has to solve these problems and Bob was writing about the solutions a long time ago. He gets dismissed as a crank from time to time, but it's nice to see something he laid out getting a little push.