Isaiah Taylor

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.

We can run that water and that CO2 through the same systems that we use on Earth to generate hydrocarbons.

And we can do it on Mars.

This is super exciting and also very counterintuitive.

We talked a little bit before about how amazing fissile material is in this rock that has so much power in it.

An interesting thought experiment is to think about, let's say you have a starship that takes off from Earth and gets to Mars, and then it needs to make its own fuel to get back.

The question is, how much uranium do you need to take with you on that starship to get back from the surface of Mars to Earth?

So you've taken off, you've got a bunch of fuel, and then you have a chunk of uranium to power our nuclear reactors to make the fuel to get you back.

How much uranium do you have to take?

You know, a starship is a huge, huge thing.

It's the largest flying object.

It's basically like a flying skyscraper, right?

So you would imagine you're gonna need a lot of uranium.

The answer is actually a cube about this big.

You need a cube of uranium about this large to generate all of the fuel to get that starship back to the surface of Earth again.