this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Mars (Planet)
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electrolysis of water. needs two ingredients: electricity and water. you'd carry water tanks mid-flight to produce oxygen continuously, because it's much easier to carry water than to carry oxygen, because oxygen tanks would need a lot of volume.
obviously the ship needs to harvest solar energy mid-flight to provide that electricity. on the surface of mars, you'd also harvest solar energy again (from the same solar panels) but because there's day/night and summer/winter rhythm, you don't have a steady source of electricity. so you need to produce oxygen when you have electricity and then store it for later time.
compare this to outer space, where there's no night and also no winter. so you don't need to store any oxygen there at all, as you can continuously produce it.
Assuming you're completely dependent upon solar power, that might make sense. In that case, a large amount of oxygen storage is basically just a way of storing energy.
Honestly, though, if you want to build a real Martian base, I think nuclear power is the way to go. Then you can have plenty of electricity, without needing to worry about seasonal cycles, battery banks, dust storms, etc. Just imagine the maintenance nightmare of needing to send crews to the surface to clean off all the solar panels after every dust storm...
Nuclear power is going to require some heavier, more complex components to set up and maybe the occasional resupply of fissile material from Earth. (Even if Mars does have some good uranium deposits, setting up the production line to mine, refine, and enrich it would require an awful lot of infrastructure. You'd maybe eventually set all that up, but early on, you've probably got bigger, simpler objectives to complete.) But you can easily go years or decades between nuclear fuel supply runs, and in the meantime you get the benefit of abundant, reliable power.
sure, what could possibly go wrong by putting nuclear fissile material into a rocket and launching it into space... what makes you think that nuclear energy is any more attractive on mars than it is on earth? it's being outcompeted by renewable energy.
It's nothing we haven't done already. We already have nuclear-powered satellites, probes, and rovers.
It's not that nuclear energy is much more attractive -- it's that renewables on Mars are less attractive.
Wind? Martian atmosphere is too thin to generate any meaningful power from wind -- there just isn't enough air to turn turbine blades with any significant force.
Hydro? Complete non-starter: no flowing water available.
Geothermal? Mars is much less geologically active than Earth -- finding a good location for geothermal is going to be much more difficult, and it's already kind of difficult on Earth.
Solar? Your only real option, but even then, it's much less efficient than on Earth because Mars is farther away from the sun and gets less sunlight.
Every type of renewable energy is either impossible or significantly less efficient on Mars. But Nuclear power would work just as well on Mars as it does on Earth.
There's also the maintenance issue to consider. Nuclear power can be maintained by a small, well-trained crew that never needs to go outside of the power plant to do anything. But solar panels will need regular dust cleaning, which will be a labor-intensive process requiring lots of time on the surface.
Power storage is also an issue. Solar power will require huge amounts of battery banks to ensure you still have adequate power through night, winter, and dust storms. You'd have to size the solar arrays and batteries to account for the worst case scenario of a dust storm lasting all summer and going an entire Martian year with reduced energy production. But an adequately sized nuclear plant will remain adequately sized at all times, and you'd only want battery banks as an emergency backup in case something goes wrong and takes the nuclear plant temporarily offline.
Both are still viable, yes ... but for a large, permanent base, I think nuclear power is the way to go. It's easier to produce large amounts of power, easier to maintain, and the reliable steady production means you don't need significant energy storage.
An inhabited Martian base will need lots of electrical power (mostly to heat occupied compartments). It seems a lot easier to me to have one modest-sized nuclear power plant, versus enormous fields full of solar panels and huge battery banks to try and meet the same needs.