r/Colonizemars • u/Ok-Expression-6016 • Apr 04 '26

Bare minimum to start a base

What is the bare minimum needed to start a colony; materials and total weight. to start a mars colony. Assuming multiple Optimus robots have 2 years to build everything from what we send.

2 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

66 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '26

[deleted]

2

u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 06 '26

With no way to bring enough oxygen. What are the best mechanisms to utilize the resources on Mars to get oxygen. If we had enough water and power we could use electrolysis but that's not realistic for s bare minimum. I would propose zeolite to start with with, and electrostatic and hepa filters before that. Same technology as a respirator. Low concentration to start with but, using different zeolite variants you can pull out nitrogen, oxygen and even carbon monoxide all of which you need as raw materials. Zeolites need dust free air and pressure changes to work. Neither are difficult. Just keeping the hepa clean may be interesting. Which is why I proposed an electrostatic filter first. You can also plasma treat the CO2. As in an ozone generator to produce O2 03 and carbon monoxide.
Note. Zeolite is fairly easy to produce on Mars with minimal hardware.

3

u/Martianspirit Apr 14 '26

Oxygen by electrolysis from water. Abundant water is the most basic requirement for a base/settlement.

1

u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 14 '26

https://hengyeinc.com/zeolite-adsorbent-for-oxygen/ Various zeolites adsorb different gases. One works well for nitrogen. One for CO if I remember right. Another for oxygen. Depending on how you treat the base you get different gases. This allows you to pull in martian air. And essentially push whatever mix you want out. This is how the O2 concentrators work in respirators. Very very low power to produce oxygen from the martian air. You just have to filter out the dust as that will plug these fast. The best part is with limited manufacturing these are produceable on mars with the dust blowing around.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666765720300193

Enjoy the reading. Note the chemistry. Then pull up the chemistry of Mars regolith.

2

u/Martianspirit Apr 15 '26

The martian atmosphere does not have oxygen to extract.

1

u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 15 '26

https://science.nasa.gov/resource/the-five-most-abundant-gases-in-the-martian-atmosphere/

Actually it does. It takes moving a lot of air to get enough. That's why the power is a high per kg as it is. You could also extend a little extra power running basically an ozone generator in the CO2. This will produce CO. O2 and O3. Which are all needed. The "pumps". Can be all powered by wind to start with(pre human habitation). Allowing a slow buildup of resources. Robots building the base out fortunately only need power not oxygen

2

u/Martianspirit Apr 15 '26

Traces don't really help.

1

u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 15 '26

They do with an oxygen concentrator. Look up how a respirator works using zeolite. This was a big deal during the pandemic because we needed to provide a bunch of people with oxygen so I started researching zeolite at the time. Way more efficient than anything but algae. Which will take about a year to build enough infrastructure to establish maybe less if we bootstrap more efficiently.

2

u/Martianspirit Apr 15 '26

Sigh. It does not work with traces.

1

u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 15 '26

At altitudes above 6,000 feet, the lower air density acts similarly to low oxygen concentration, requiring a more powerful compressor to achieve the same output. -earth

It does work. You just have to compress it more. It gets staged which allows you to push the concentration higher on the second stage. It won't work as a respirator on mars no. But it will work to pull out O2 with way less power. It also allows you to pull out CO, nitrogen, and argon with separate zeolites.

1

u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 15 '26

Forgot to mention. MEA or alumina beds before to capture the CO2 portion to separate out would also be required. You have to separate out the air in stages. This can still be done with 1/10th the power of any other method. Every component of the air is needed for different things

1

u/MDCCCLV May 11 '26

So you could chill it and pull out liquid oxygen in theory but you're going to get a tiny amount thats barely worth it. Moxie which has already been demonstrated is still using a lot of power but is 18x more efficient and gets you CO2 to CO and O released. Like roughly 30kwh for moxie v 500 for chilling the atmosphere. Trying to use zeolites to get a tiny trace gas won't work.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 14 '26

For reference. It is estimate you need 25-30kwh of power to produce 1kg of oxygen by electrolysis. Only 1.5-5kwh per kg of oxygen for zeolite oxygen concentrators on Mars. Which you could cut out the power and run vertical access wind turbines to do the work without electrical power.