What!? Please be more coherent.Welcome to the forum, I think.
We are supposed to colonize space. Suppose the moon. (Note: No Cycler option, simple human colony). Problem arises in the production of water. How would you suggest we establish a sustainable water cycle on the moon ?
Quote from: doge on 09/06/2014 04:39 pmWe are supposed to colonize space. Suppose the moon. (Note: No Cycler option, simple human colony). Problem arises in the production of water. How would you suggest we establish a sustainable water cycle on the moon ? Recycling? Already being done on ISS to a degree... But any mission longer than a couple of months will have to be close to a closed loop system, where as much as possible is recycled. Water is one of the easiest things to recycle.If a colony is established on an arid body, that will have to be scaled up.
recycling of O2 and H2O on the ISS is already at ~90%. This is good enough for ferry missions and more than good enough for Mars. Very high closures are hard to achieve and may not be worth it initially.
If we ever go for large scale colonization of anything, I believe aquiring nitrogen to fill living space with air is probably going to be one of the harder issues to solve. Once you make structures large enough, the mass of the air inside them tends to increase very rapidly. For O'Neill cylinders or martian air-filled domes, the air inside constitutes the majority of the total mass, and while finding the oxygen to fill them tends to be easy, making nitrogen in large enough quantities for use as a buffer gas tends to be a harder problem to solve. Even for small colonies it can be a bottleneck as it is needed to make fertilizer.
If we ever go for large scale colonization of anything, I believe aquiring nitrogen to fill living space with air is probably going to be one of the harder issues to solve.
Quote from: Nilof on 09/10/2014 05:38 pmIf we ever go for large scale colonization of anything, I believe aquiring nitrogen to fill living space with air is probably going to be one of the harder issues to solve.I think the martian atmosphere is about 3% nitrogen. We don't seem to need it in our breathing air and there would be a couple of huge advantages of omitting it: reducing base structural stresses by a factor of 3, the ability to step straight from base to rover to suit without prebreathing.It does seem sort of incredible that about 75% of the atmosphere we evolved in could be omitted without any bad side effects but we have discussed it here a few times and Im not aware of anyone producing evidence for it.
ask the poor spouses of the Apollo crew that got incinerated in their capsule if there is no drawback to omitting nitrogen from their air. There is at least one: living without diluting gases in an oxygen environment will kill you sooner or later especially as so many things that have to be done will generate an ignition source.and i also vaguely recall that pure o2 damages biological tissue in various ways. I don't recall from where i read that but that is the feeling i get from the vast swamp of my memory.
a low-pressure-pure-oxygen atmosphere has no demonstrated adverse health effects.The same applies to fire hazards