Extracting Water on Mars | MARS: How to Survive on Mars

Water is the essential ingredient to life as we know it. Everywhere we look, water is where life is. So, that's why the mantra for Mars exploration has been thus far: follow the water. We know some of the places where water happens to be because that's critical.

You don't want to send humans where there is no water on Mars. You know, just below a layer of dry regolith, basically dry dirt, um, there's an ice table with ice. You can drill for the water; actually, you drill, you get to the ice, and you pull the ice. It's not any different than Antarctica.

There's so much water on Mars in the form of ice that if all of it were to melt at once, the entire planet would be 1,000 ft deep in water. We already have the technology to just about perfectly recycle it if we need to.

They're going to take that water, clean it up, get all the sewage out of it, and treat it with chemicals and other things, and you'll be drinking it. It's cleaner and safer than your tap water when it's done.

It's not just because we're going to melt it and brush our teeth with it, but also because water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, and those are the two components of rocket fuel. So, you break apart the hydrogen and the oxygen, and now you've got this fuel source that can help sustain you, um, and keep you in this place.