Isaiah Taylor

We don't think about in-space transit quite as much yet.

Maybe we will someday, but there's a lot of smart people working on that.

What I'm more interested in is making power on Mars.

So we want to go to Mars.

I think a lot of people in my generation are very excited about Mars.

We talked a little bit about this before with the frontier, right?

Americans are always looking for a frontier.

And I think a lot of people in my generation see Mars as that frontier, and it's very exciting.

But one of the first things that Mars needs is power, need a lot of power.

And it's not just for the local generation.

It's not just to make electricity to turn on the lights and operate the AC on a Mars base.

It's also to get fuel to come back to Earth, right?

So when the first starships land, these are Methalox starships, right?

So that means they have liquid methane and liquid oxygen burning in the Raptor engines.

And like we talked about before, methane is a hydrocarbon.

right so what we're talking about is liquid hydrocarbons powering the rocket to get to mars now these rockets are supposed to be reusable right so they're supposed to be able to land on mars and then come back and get more cargo and they're supposed to be able to go back and forth well where do you get the methane from on mars we don't have methane infrastructure there we don't have fracking and natural gas and like all the things that we have on earth that get us methane on earth

so what you can do is the same thing that we'll do here on earth which is we'll generate hydrocarbons from nuclear and in some ways the challenge is actually easier on mars so for instance the the atmosphere is basically co2 so we we don't have to worry about difficult carbon capture systems you're basically just pulling in the atmosphere to get your carbon

And then the hydrogen is going to come from ice.

So there's lots of ice mixed in the soil on Mars.

And so we can actually process water out of the soil.