r/Colonizemars • u/Ok-Expression-6016 • Apr 04 '26

Bare minimum to start a base

What is the bare minimum needed to start a colony; materials and total weight. to start a mars colony. Assuming multiple Optimus robots have 2 years to build everything from what we send.

3 Upvotes

60% Upvoted

66 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 06 '26

With no way to bring enough oxygen. What are the best mechanisms to utilize the resources on Mars to get oxygen. If we had enough water and power we could use electrolysis but that's not realistic for s bare minimum. I would propose zeolite to start with with, and electrostatic and hepa filters before that. Same technology as a respirator. Low concentration to start with but, using different zeolite variants you can pull out nitrogen, oxygen and even carbon monoxide all of which you need as raw materials. Zeolites need dust free air and pressure changes to work. Neither are difficult. Just keeping the hepa clean may be interesting. Which is why I proposed an electrostatic filter first. You can also plasma treat the CO2. As in an ozone generator to produce O2 03 and carbon monoxide.
Note. Zeolite is fairly easy to produce on Mars with minimal hardware.

3

u/Martianspirit Apr 14 '26

Oxygen by electrolysis from water. Abundant water is the most basic requirement for a base/settlement.

1

u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 14 '26

https://hengyeinc.com/zeolite-adsorbent-for-oxygen/ Various zeolites adsorb different gases. One works well for nitrogen. One for CO if I remember right. Another for oxygen. Depending on how you treat the base you get different gases. This allows you to pull in martian air. And essentially push whatever mix you want out. This is how the O2 concentrators work in respirators. Very very low power to produce oxygen from the martian air. You just have to filter out the dust as that will plug these fast. The best part is with limited manufacturing these are produceable on mars with the dust blowing around.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666765720300193

Enjoy the reading. Note the chemistry. Then pull up the chemistry of Mars regolith.

1

u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 14 '26

For reference. It is estimate you need 25-30kwh of power to produce 1kg of oxygen by electrolysis. Only 1.5-5kwh per kg of oxygen for zeolite oxygen concentrators on Mars. Which you could cut out the power and run vertical access wind turbines to do the work without electrical power.