Re: What about Oxygen?
How abundant and available is oxygen on Mars?
Mars' crust is mostly oxygen compounds: basalt, granite, etc. Roughly speaking, Mars' crust is 45-50% oxygen by mass, like Earth's.
There are a lot of industrial processes for separating the various elements in minerals from their oxygen jailers since most of the metals human love appear in Earth's crust as oxygen compounds. Therefore, the chemistry needed extract oxygen from rocks is pretty well established, it's just a matter of engineering details to focus on oxygen production over metal production. Iron ore refining, for example, tends to throw away oxygen in the form of carbon dioxide.
So, there's not a shortage of oxygen on Mars. However, there are easier options than trying to extract oxygen from basalt. Splitting water might be energy intensive, but the hardware is relatively simple.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
