3 ms·

Some other stuff martians will need: - Replacement rubber caskets for airlocks and the kilometres of plumbing. Synthetic rubber seems petrol based; natural rub

Some other stuff martians will need: - Replacement rubber caskets for airlocks and the kilometres of plumbing. Synthetic rubber seems petrol based; natural rubber trees seem to need a lot of space. - A source of fabric for clothes and other cloth stuff. Presumably natural fibres like hemp or cotton or plastic fibres. Sheep, I think, will be right out. Mars is vegan. - An enormous amount of greenhouses (a lot of glass) or grow houses (energy, insulation) for growing the vegan diet. I assume a Martian colony will look something like this: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150070/almerias-sea-of-greenhouses https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150070/almerias-sea...

PaulHoule 2y ago
I am not that worried that petrol can be replaced for "petrochemical" applications. Somewhere there is going to be a carbon processing system that harvests CO2 from the atmosphere and either feeds it to plants or cracks it into CO + O2 and builds up larger molecules. Between Fisher-Trospch type chemistry, pyrolysis of waste products and other methods, not to mention advanced biotech, quite a bit should be possible. If we're ever going to have carbon neutral chemicals we'll have to figure this out for terrestrial use.
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  Nice! Would that fit (unmounted/folded) inside a reasonable number of rockets? Wonder also what’s the plans to process those chemicals to finite products, in quality high enough to leverage auto-production for those facilities (some) spare parts.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    It's basically the same stuff the rockets themselves are made of. Large towers with miles of plumbing and corrosion resistant tanks.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      I did a lot of analysis for asteroid mining and one of the things I worried about the most was what to do with the volatiles that come out when you start digging into the asteroid (believe it or not some of them have a lot of trapped gas.) In fact you might want to separate the volatiles out first thing but that involves having storage tanks to put them in. Once you got a metals line running it wouldn't be hard to make storage tanks (they don't need to be very strong) but you don't want to waste valuable volatiles plus the volatiles could even be dangerous. On Mars it is different. Water is precious but martians are likely to vent waste CO2 to the atmosphere because you are going to get all your carbon from that atmosphere. Either way you are going to need storage tanks for resource extraction, chemical factories and such and the quick way to get them would probably be taking Starships apart at least until they have steelmaking working. Starship can land 100 tonnes on the moon if it can use all its fuel on the way down, it doesn't do much better than the Apollo LEM did if it returns to cislunar space. It's a reasonable plan to land a Starship with a bulldozer on the moon, lay it down into a trench and cover it up with regolith to make a habitat.
codesnik 2y ago
for a lot of stuff we make from rubber various types of silicone polymers would probably work too.

PaulHoule 2y ago

I am not that worried that petrol can be replaced for "petrochemical" applications. Somewhere there is going to be a carbon processing system that harvests CO2 from the atmosphere and either feeds it to plants or cracks it into CO + O2 and builds up larger molecules. Between Fisher-Trospch type chemistry, pyrolysis of waste products and other methods, not to mention advanced biotech, quite a bit should be possible. If we're ever going to have carbon neutral chemicals we'll have to figure this out for terrestrial use.

aziaziazi 2y ago
Nice! Would that fit (unmounted/folded) inside a reasonable number of rockets? Wonder also what’s the plans to process those chemicals to finite products, in quality high enough to leverage auto-production for those facilities (some) spare parts.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  It's basically the same stuff the rockets themselves are made of. Large towers with miles of plumbing and corrosion resistant tanks.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    I did a lot of analysis for asteroid mining and one of the things I worried about the most was what to do with the volatiles that come out when you start digging into the asteroid (believe it or not some of them have a lot of trapped gas.) In fact you might want to separate the volatiles out first thing but that involves having storage tanks to put them in. Once you got a metals line running it wouldn't be hard to make storage tanks (they don't need to be very strong) but you don't want to waste valuable volatiles plus the volatiles could even be dangerous. On Mars it is different. Water is precious but martians are likely to vent waste CO2 to the atmosphere because you are going to get all your carbon from that atmosphere. Either way you are going to need storage tanks for resource extraction, chemical factories and such and the quick way to get them would probably be taking Starships apart at least until they have steelmaking working. Starship can land 100 tonnes on the moon if it can use all its fuel on the way down, it doesn't do much better than the Apollo LEM did if it returns to cislunar space. It's a reasonable plan to land a Starship with a bulldozer on the moon, lay it down into a trench and cover it up with regolith to make a habitat.

codesnik 2y ago

for a lot of stuff we make from rubber various types of silicone polymers would probably work too.