One of the biggest challenges to colonizing Mars or the Moon is to bring supplies that last long enough to sustain humans. Bringing enough fuel for the rocket to transport the crew to the Red Planet and return back is another major issue. Many scientists believe to overcome this problem, harvesting materials required for a sustained presence on Mars from the planet itself could work.

Creating rocket fuel on Mars

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a concept that will allow producing rocket fuel on Mars that can be used to send a crew back to Earth. The bioproduction concept would use resources available of the Red Planet such as carbon dioxide, sunlight, and frozen water. However, the process would need transporting of a pair of microbes to Mars.

One of the microbes is cyanobacteria (or algae) which will come in handy to extract CO2 from the Martian atmosphere and combine with sunlight to create sugars. The process will also need a special kind of engineered E. coli bacteria to convert the sugar created by the algae into propellant for rockets and other devices.

Using resources available on Mars

The rocket fuel created by the process 2,3-butanediol, a propellant that can also be created on our planet. However, we use the propellant to make polymers to produce rubber. NASA has proposed using a chemical catalyst to convert CO2 into liquid O2. Still, that would require methane to be transported to Mars along with the crew and other materials for the mission. The Georgia Tech process, however, would make use of resources already available on the Red Planet and can reduce mission costs and complexity.

Previously, Scientists at the University of Manchester suggested a new way to convert Martian soil into a stronger material to construct future colonies on the planet. They suggest mixing human blood, sweat, urine, and even tears with Moon or Martian dust to create an adhesive that can come in handy to build (3D print) entire structures. It will be interesting to see how this concept works in real-life scenarios.