[jbattle]

Assuming abundant power and effective carbon recapture / recycling, how much carbon do you need per person? If it was on the order of 50 lbs of carbon per person, and that could be infinitely recycled, that doesn't seem wildly onerous. It looks like the average person exhales about 2 pounds of carbon per day, so that's a very rough baseline in terms of carbon needs.

Is there a technology available now or soon that can scrub carbon out of the ambient air and capture that in an easy to reuse medium?

[px43]

~~Yeah, I think carbon recycling can be pretty good. They've been doing it on submarines for a while.~~

(edit: nevermind, I was confused about the submarine thing, the user "idlewords" below has a lot of good commentary about this)

At any given moment, any human is about 18% carbon. Carbon is also pretty important in *carbo*hydrates. Any plants that we would grow would need a ton of carbon. It can be done, but any moon colony will basically always be dependent on getting extra carbon from Earth, so it can never be "self sufficient" in the way that Mars can eventually be.

It is kind of funny that on Earth, we're obsessed with capturing and burying as much carbon as possible, when it's going to be an incredibly valuable resource on the moon, assuming that a bunch of people are gong to want to live there.

[shagie]

Submarines restock food, some air supplies, and... deal with waste.

Food https://youtu.be/bPJUVKizh90

Air https://youtu.be/g3Ud6mHdhlQ (MEA and LIOH for CO2, electrolysis and "candles" for oxygen)

Toilet https://youtu.be/SYFuA3xnkUE?t=985

Nothing is "recycled" as such - and certainly not any of the carbon (you're not eating the carbon captured from MEA or LIOH... or your waste).

[wonderwonder]

Seems like carbon capture and export to the moon is a business that is just short of a billionaire to implement it.

[idlewords]

Submarines don't recycle carbon; they capture CO2 and vent it.

[TaylorAlexander]

I’m pretty sure NASA has been reusing carbon on human spacecraft since at least the Apollo program.

[idlewords]

That is not the case; carbon (as CO2) was captured by disposable LiOH cartridges through the end of the Shuttle program. On the ISS, it's captured on zeolite beds and vented into space. Except for a few small-scale plant experiments, no space program has demonstrated carbon capture and re-use.