Improved Sabatier Reactions for In Situ Resource Utilization on Mars Missions
You will, we trust, recall our exchange of love notes with an academic Big Oil mouthpiece from West Texas, regarding our innuendoes that Texas is kindly offering use of their waning oil fields as a place for all of us coal-using hillbillies to, all at our expense, stash the nasty Carbon Dioxide arising, in a small way relative to natural sources of emission, from our productive uses of Coal.
Our contention was, and is, that Carbon Dioxide can be recycled into useful hydrocarbon resources, that Texas knows that; and, that they intend, once they have our discarded CO2, to start converting it into commercial fuels and selling it back to us, much as Japan shot pieces of old, junked Buicks and Chevy's back at us during WWII.
Moreover, Texas is developing and refining Carbon Dioxide recycling technology at all of our, through our United States Government's, expense.
We have earlier reported on NASA's use of Sabatier reactors on the International Space Station, to recycle the astronauts' exhaled CO2; with the resultant Methane, as one by-product, to be cast overboard.
We have also reported NASA's plans to employ Sabatier Carbon Dioxide recycling on Mars, where the Methane is the desired product, to be used for the in-situ manufacture of propellant fuel for the return trip to Earth.
Herein, linked above and excerpted below, from the University of Houston, Texas, is yet more evidence that our Federal tax money is helping Texas to develop the technology that will enable them to profit from all the Carbon Dioxide our Federal government might someday compel us to send them.
Comment follows:
"Improved Sabatier Reactions for In Situ Resource Utilization on Mars Missions
James T. Richardson, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Houston
In situ resource utilization (ISRU) is one of five areas with the highest cost leverage for manned missions to Mars.1 Specifically, ISRU applied to the manufacture of the propellant for the return journey reduces earth-to-orbit mass by 20-45 percent, thereby increasing the cost-effectiveness of the mission. NASA plans to establish chemical plants on Mars prior to the arrival of the first astronauts. These chemical plants will process carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere to make methane, using the Sabatier reaction ... ."
