Chinese astronauts make rocket fuel and oxygen in space
12 comments
·August 24, 2025kevinmershon
andrewflnr
Why aren't we engineering plants to produce automotive fuel? We ought to at least be able to do diesel.
staplung
Biodiesal is already a thing. Also, we (the US) already blend a portion (about 10%) of corn-derived ethanol to our gasoline. There are problems with it though, one of which is that overall, it probably has a higher carbon footprint (fertilizer, harvesting, processing, etc.) than just not using it.
philipkglass
Plants have very low sunlight conversion efficiency compared to solar farms. If you need chemical fuel instead of electricity, it would still be more efficient to use solar electricity to turn carbon dioxide and water into simple liquid fuels like methanol (usable in spark ignition engines) or dimethyl ether (usable in diesel engines).
asdff
We do this for some plants. Hybrid palms are used for palm oil production due to the favorable yields and properties compared to parental species. One might ask why there are no cars powered off palm oil seeing as we can readily grow it across the world?
sandworm101
There are. Millions of them. Most any diesel can run just fine on vegitable oil. (Some very modern ones might need the electronic control systems tweakes.) There have been times/places where grocery stores put limits on oil once it became cheaper than diesel.
Mythbusters: https://youtu.be/QEX1YFXYTdI
TopGear: https://youtu.be/GOFbsaNeZps
habibur
This won't enable perpetual space travel in case anyone thought so.
Rockets need to eject particles to generate force. And to eject 1 kg of fuel, its photo synthesis system has to lose 1 km of mass in one way or another.
The solution is to find a way to generate thrust without rocket fuel ejection.
Buttons840
Can we "swim" through space? Collect particles from space, add energy, expell them backwards to generate a net thrust.
monster_truck
This is from January, have there been any updates in the past 7 months?
There is exceptionally little material info in this article and so very much speculation
nashashmi
Apparently it has been in production since 2015. Why is this the first we are hearing about it?
> This is a similar reaction to photosynthesis in plants, which produces glucose instead of rocket fuel.
This is silly, but also begs the sillier question why we aren't bioengineering plants to produce rocket fuel