I'm John Baxter with David Livingston, Dr. Space in the Space Show.

We're here to celebrate the future on Mars thanks to a 40-pound baby called Moxie.

Mars Oxygen in situ resource utilization experiment loaded on perseverance, where

surveillance has traveled to Mars was exciting.

Perseverance is now roving the surface of Mars and Moxie is demonstrating its capabilities.

Recently, they let it run for nearly an hour and knowing that it might be exceeding the limits

on the back of the envelope. It didn't. It did very well. It produced lots of oxygen.

So Moxie in small samples is a success. Professor, this is a part of the program I enjoy.

I give you an unlimited budget. No fussing about the weight ratio. We can send as much of this

experiment or the next experiment says you want. We'll sign up musk to do it for us.

What next do you like want to see from Moxie or its capabilities before we build those

30 tons of oxygen you'll need to take off? Yeah. What would really be nice would be an end-to-end

process that would run continuously on Mars and at the end, not just all we do with the oxygen

is we measure it for how much we produce and what its purity is and then we just release it back

to the atmosphere of Mars. Ultimately, if you can use it as rocket propellant, you have to

liquefy it and that becomes a significant user of energy just like the electrolysis itself

and compressing the Mars atmosphere. So an end-to-end demonstration of a continuous

production and then maybe combine that with a much larger scale Mars sample return mission

and you would actually fuel up the rocket for the sample return with Mars produced propellants.

But on the other hand, maybe you don't have to do that. We know enough about the process now that

if someone said, let's start building this right away, I think from what we've learned from Moxie

and the work that's being done by a company like Oxion out in Salt Lake City which made our

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