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Martian Materials Might Be Used To Fly Us Back To Earth

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If Elon Musk gets the funding he requires (through stealing underpants or otherwise), it looks like we could soon be holidaying on Mars. Under normal circumstances, no one wants their holiday to end, and given news of other Mars missions you would be forgiven for thinking that any trip to Mars would be a one ticket only. Not according to Musk, who plans on utilizing Martian materials with some solar energy to create the fuel required to bring us space tourists home to Planet Earth again.

The atmosphere on Mars is abundant with carbon dioxide. Not great for us humans, as breathing this in would suffocate us without space suits, but not so bad as an ingredient in fuel. Musk hopes that by mining for Martian ice in soil on Mars and liberating the liquid water held within it, he can combine this with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to create methane and oxygen. The two can burn together to release energy and get us home.

If you have ever put dry ice in water, you may know that carbon dioxide and water do not exactly react. The former can slightly dissolve in the latter, giving rise to things like acid rain, but that won't be enough to boot us off a planet and onward to another one. This is why, in order to get them to react to produce methane fuel and oxygen, we need to add energy.

Musk hopes to harvest this energy from the Sun, through the use of huge areas of solar panels. By driving the reaction with this energy, a propellant plant can be created on Mars. The time required to build this will need to be invested before a return journey is required, or else fuel will need to be taken with the cargo and limited crew of the first few trips, but once the propellant plant is established and in operational use, it will allow flights to Mars to travel lighter, with less mass and more space for Martian tourists, driving down the cost of space travel, Musk's ultimate goal.

Technology like this could be employed on Mars, but what about Earth? Using solar energy to create solar fuels from abundant resources could help us meet the global energy demands, while also being more environmentally friendly. What we can take from Musk's presentation is that, if we can manage this on Mars, why can we not start to implement this technology right here on Earth? Perhaps in doing so, we won't have to leave this little blue marble of ours just yet.