This is Hotel Mars episode n I'm John Bachel with David Livingston Dr. Space of the Space Show also of Hotel Mars and we're visiting with Michael Hect who is a genuine leader to hotel Mars.

Hotel Mars is a construction in my imagination. I do not believe I'll reach the planet Mars. I'm not certain I'll see man and woman reach the planet Mars. But oxygen is the hook that we have.

And Michael as the principal investigator on the experiment, Moxie, that is on board perseverance right now in Jezero Crater has given us to understand that making oxygen is something that's imaginable.

The chemistry is very straightforward. You need power to do it and you need scale to provide for human beings. However, Michael, I come to you on this puzzle.

You have an unlimited budget now and the question of producing oxygen for a four or six person mission is a challenge that's frontier thinking.

You know, first you have to get there and see how you can survive and not on the surface, probably under the surface. What I'm imagining is a Mars colony that uses lava tubes because they're hollowed out underneath it would protect you from the dangers of the surface of Mars because the very thin atmosphere doesn't protect the way our atmosphere does.

Are you at MIT or you at JPL or NASA already working on that scale and is that scale imaginable to fill a lava tube or a constrained space with oxygen on a continual basis so that we're manufacturing earth like conditions admittedly the atmosphere the gravity is not anywhere close to what we have here on earth.

It will change us but maintaining an atmosphere that not only can make humans breathe but also sustain plant life and a grary in life and growing things. Is that already on the drawing board, Michael?

It is absolutely on the drawing board and let me give you an idea of how that will work. If we have, let's suppose we have a hundred people in the lava tube. That's a really good start toward a sustained presence on Mars.

That's a research station at least. Those hundred people in terms of breathing and in terms of the things that they'll use cooking and whatnot will probably use 20 or 30 grams an hour of oxygen.

So let's say two to three kilograms an hour to keep that whole lava tube community, you know, going and thriving. That's about the same amount that we're planning to make just to fill up a tank of oxygen for a rocket.

So the lava tube is the easy part we could do that if you gave me the budget that you offered. We can limit start that tomorrow. Right our own check we could start doing that tomorrow.

I've always thought that doing a full scale moxie is no harder than doing the one that we've done. It just is bigger and needs more power that we don't have on Mars.

So yes, we're ready to build that system and you'd have one system maybe in the lava tube and you'd have a much bigger one outside to just as a rocket fuel factory.

And then we'd invest in the ability in robotic trucks and cars to drive up to the north where there's a permafrost and ice and to dig up ice and bring it back. So now we can use water and oxygen to do chemistry and make fuel and all sorts of things that we need.

And I even love the idea of having you mentioned moxie in a backpack of having something like I think of the mini split units we put on our walls to do heating and cooling and adding moxie to that.

So we'll get warm air cold air and oxygen and carbon dioxide scrubbing all in one climate unit that we can put in our cars and our rovers and in our homes and in our deceivos.

David.

Just any of this lead toward and support terraforming or is that a totally different topic in situation.

A terraforming on Mars or an earth for that matter. It's a totally different situation. I constantly get asked about the earth situation.

Can't you use this to do something about climate change and the answer is, you know, not really this still takes a lot of energy.

And the first thing we have to use for climate learned for climate change is how to produce lots of energy without carbon dioxide.

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