>>11021821>Basically what you're saying is near term we can't do Mars.No, I'm saying it is completely impossible for Starship to bring the hydrogen it needs to Mars with it, so it will have to get it from Mars itself, therefore water mining NEEDS to happen before any ISRU methane can be made. You can't pull off any tricks or fenaggle anything to get that hydrogen to Mars from Earth in any chemical form, including pure hydrogen.
Luckily, there's no reason why we can't develop a machine that digs up permafrost and loads it into an oven to drive off and collect the water vapor as it heats it up. This vapor would then be compressed into bottles until it liquefied, then electrolysed from there to make hydrogen to make methane. It's something we could do remotely form Earth, it'd just be slow. What will probably happen is SpaceX will load up a couple demonstrator harvester units on the first couple unmanned Starships to attempt the mission, and they'll deploy them and prove that they work, though they won't get much actually done. Then they'll send a few more unmanned Cargo Starships loaded to the tits with supplies along with one or two manned Starships, which will all land close to the original unmanned landed vehicle, and get to work. Most work will still be done remotely, however with no lag from trying to control the things from Earth the rate of digging and water collection will be much faster, easily faster than what they'd need to keep up with the ISRU plant, which can only electrolyse so many kilograms of water per day given their power supply.
If yo disagree then YOU are in fact the one saying that these missions will be impossible. Elon has already said that the first manned missions will be risky, and this is why; they need to get ISRU producing methane with a lot of hands-on work. The risk is that if they miss the first return window, about 1.5 years after they land on Mars, then they're gonna be stuck for another 2 years until the next window.
