Alex McColgan

However, China is looking into other options, likely because once you get out to the ranges of planets like Jupiter, sunlight is no longer strong enough.

NASA's Juno mission is the furthest spacecraft to use solar panels to date, as I talk about in another of my videos here, but by that distance from the Sun, light levels drop to just 3% of what we get here on Earth, hardly enough to support large projects out at that distance.

And what this implies is that China is considering large projects at that distance, especially when combined with their aim to create efficient propulsion systems with long operating life.

Any rocket fuel propulsion system can get heavy on long trips, as you have to carry all the fuel you use, unless you can develop it in situ.

Due to these increasing logistical costs, outposts that are self-sufficient are incredibly valuable.

Which is why taikonauts are also actively exploring ways to recycle oxygen, water, grow food, prevent microbial problems, and harmless degradation of waste.

This is one of the reasons Tychonauts are experimenting growing rice in space.

They're also performing studies on the effects of microgravity on living organisms, such as fruit flies, to see how the conditions of space affect life.

And just at the start of the year, Tychonauts successfully tested a technology that brings oxygen recycling and the need for in-situ rocket fuel together.

In the first experiment of its kind, using a semiconductor catalyst, taikonauts on Tiangong produced oxygen and hydrocarbon ethylene out of carbon dioxide in an instance of artificial photosynthesis.

Hydrocarbon ethylene can be used to make rocket fuel, but researchers also believe they could use the same process to make methane, formic acid, or even sugars, mimicking what plants do on Earth.

This discovery is groundbreaking.

On the ISS, the electricity required to recycle oxygen using electrolysis techniques is thought to take up a third of the ISS's energy usage.

This new process is more efficient, gets rid of the CO2 being breathed, and can be done at room temperature.

That's an incredibly useful technology to have on any long-distance space mission.

Finally, taikonauts are testing their gear to make sure it works in space.

This is the last of the five research themes, and while not as flashy as the others, it's a vital step in the process, and one that's difficult to replicate on Earth.

The unique conditions of microgravity can put a lot of different strains on machinery for one example.

Fluid dynamics are much harder to currently model for another.

And if you want to solve these things, it's practically impossible to replicate microgravity if you're deep within our gravity well.