The technology already exists. Fundamentally (damn laws of thermodynamics) it is also a energy negative process, and hence expensive. It is far cheaper to just frack and burn fossil fuels (where that energy expense was paid however many millions of years ago by someone else), than it is to expend the energy to reverse the process - even if they were getting nearly free energy.
I don't think that anyone is trying to make the claim that SpaceX will use the Sabatier process to fuel Starships here on Earth right now routinely. As you say, gas is cheaper to buy here on Earth. But they still must have the technology mastered before they fly away from the low Earth orbit.
This isn’t something unknown or theoretical.
And contemporary off-the-shelf components that perform the Sabatier process aren't probably meant to operate outside the Earth.
Not if NASA did that decades ago.
Yet they aren’t, correct?
It is up to the controllers of incentive structures to change the fundamentals of commerce/ecology.
who knows what expense space X would be willing to shoulder to be sustainable... We are fortunate that it is still privately owned, and isn't legally obligated to pursue the financial interests of shareholders like all the other players in aerospace.
5x over what? The US doesn't have a carbon tax does it?
Not saying all human endeavor needs to have a healthy profit margin. SpaceX is a business however and besides doing it for the lulz, or getting a government contract, it doesn’t make much sense to try to spin up colonies or the like there. Everyone will starve and/or their US backers will go bankrupt pretty quick.
SpaceX has been described as a company with a Mars cult inside of it.
I think it's more fair to say that it's a Mars cult that has organized a company.
If you think that SpaceX won't do hydrocarbon generation on Mars, then you don't understand why SpaceX exists.
This isn't an original SpaceX idea. Robert Zubrin pointed it out back in 1990 with his Mars Direct plan.
And if we have all that, getting a mobile lab there and sending back bits instead of physical chunks of things is even easier.
You’d also need to get chemical feedstocks and process them (namely to extract the hydrogen, which is not readily available in the Martian atmosphere but is in the soil in various amounts in minerals and small amounts of dispersed water and methane ice) which would be non-trivial and a huge hassle to get even on Earth where you can go outside and smack the machinery with a shovel or stick your arm in somewhere to unclog something.
The existing Mars rovers struggle sometimes with dust on solar panels, let alone a broken bolt in a crusher due to harder than expected rocks or the like.
Having done some basic mining and a lot of earth moving over the years, it’s an incredible pain in the ass.
It’s also rare you don’t periodically need a human getting hands on, and using every bit of dexterity and strength they have to fix something. Robotic tech is nowhere near good enough to do this remotely.
So at a small, very very very slow scale? Maybe?
There are a lot of cool thought problems from all this, and some cool potential solutions. My fav is Project Orion [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...]
And we’ll just have to see what happens.
