NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has pronounced the agency’s $11 billion, 15-year mission to collect and return samples from Mars: insufficient.
But the strategy shift could be a huge boon to space startups, to which much of that planned funding will almost certainly be redirected.
(There’s plenty of time to save and repurpose the most important concepts and research already done by NASA and its partners.)
But the official announcement, and the implication that it is the new generation of space companies that will accomplish ambitious goals like a there-and-back trip to Mars, must be very validating.
Whatever that new plan may be, it will almost certainly rely far more than before on commercial services and hardware.
The modern world is dependent on a vast network for extracting, processing, transporting and ultimately consuming hydrocarbons like crude oil and natural gas.
Instead of reducing humanity’s dependence on hydrocarbons — which is impossible or undesirable or both, depending on who you ask — Terraform Industries’ solution is to produce this resource, using electricity and air, via a system it calls the Terraformer.
Today, the startup is announcing that it has commissioned a demonstrator Terraformer and produced synthetic natural gas for the first time.
Roughly the size of two shipping containers, the Terraformer consists of three subsystems: an electrolyzer, which converts solar power into hydrogen; a direct air capture system that captures CO2; and a chemical reactor that ingests both these inputs to produce pipeline-grade synthetic natural gas.
The startup says that improvements are already in the works to bring these prices down even further to ensure that its synthetic natural gas hits cost parity with conventionally sourced liquified natural gas.
