Here’s an interesting schematic that describes how they plan to keep crew alive to Mars and back. Doesn’t look like they’re trying to recover water from feces, but that makes sense if they’re going to use them for radiation protection. And they’re venting methane. I’d think that it would be interesting to consider it as fuel for RCS, but perhaps that’s too high a technology risk for a mission that has to leave in less than five years. I don’t see any power input to the system, but I guess that’s a separate issue.
Here’s the full briefing to FISO.
[Via NewSpace Watch]
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, looking over the briefing, the current baseline seems to be two launches, one for propellant and one for crew, within a couple weeks of each other.
I don’t see any power input to the system
It’s right there — “Exercise Equipment”. 😀
Freeze drying is really quite easy. The methane I’d just burn for power directly – you should already be scrubbing CO2 out of the air. But … they’re ‘just’ converting the CO2 back to methane and venting it. Hum.
Thinking this can all be integrated a little tighter. (Eventually.)
Al, it looks like the approach is that they have large stores of water and get the oxygen directly from that via electrolysis (which may be their main power draw incidentally). That leaves a pile of hydrogen to deal with. Reacting it with carbon dioxide means that half the hydrogen can be recycled. Looks like the carbon part of the methane will come from food.
So they won’t have spare oxygen to react with the methane. I suppose they could use it for propellant. But they don’t have much need for that sort of mass saving.