A Space Odyssey: A Short Story

My sci-fi story:

My story is going to about a man who is exploring the galaxy with his robots in the future. They are going to visit most planets in the solar system. The fuel, food, water, oxygen and some other life supplies are going to rely on themselves to get. And there are going to be some stories about the planets they have visited.

The major technologies they have used in the solar system is using the solar energy when they don’t need large portion of power. And the other theory they rely on is space jump by creating space worm hole. And the AI at that time is very advanced. The robots can do almost everything that humans can do.

Space Habitability Long-term space exploration for human beings is still a challenge. First of all,

The long-term space mission will cost less if we do not need to bring foods over and over again from the Earth. And we can save the time we spend on fetching the food as well. If the space garden is well developed, we can just simply go back the international space station to get what we need to eat in the future. After the technique is well developed, we can try to grow more kinds of vegetables even fruits in the space garden. How about water? Water is relatively heavier than foods if we need to carry it from the Earth. It is best to use some water filter system to reduce the portion of water we bring from the Earth. The best way to produce water in the space is to purify the urine in some process. But we still don’t have the technology right now. If in the future we can solve this problem, that will become the primary solution to reproduce water in the space. Is there any other possible way to reduce the amount of water we need to bring to the space? Yes, we do have some other solutions. One solution given by the NASA is to reduce the size and weight of the life support. How did they do it? they use catalyst to react with carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce water. In this way we can reduce the amount of water from the Earth and lower the

What method do we usually use to produce Oxygen? That is electrolysis of water. electrolysis of H2O can produce both H2 and O2. O2 is oxygen we need. We can separate them and release the H2 out of the container to get O2 only. That is also the main method we are using right now. The following picture shows how does this process work: photo by HSW

But water is a significant thing that we need as well. We cannot rely on the method to produce oxygen. There is also other way to produce oxygen without using water. This chemistry formula shows what do we need to do: NaClO3 (s) + Fe (s) -> 3O2 (g) + NaCl (s) + FeO (s). This method is called oxygen candles. It burns iron and chlorate mixture powder together at about 600 Celsius to produce Oxygen gas (O2), salt (NaCl) and iron oxide (FeO) (Freudenrich). Other than oxygen, we can also produce salt as well by using this method.

Bibliography:

Dunbar, B. (n.d.). Growing Plants and Vegetables in a Space Garden. Retrieved January 26, 2018, from https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/10-074.html

Dunbar, B. (2015, August 17). The Sabatier System: Producing Water on the Space Station.

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