There’s just one catch: Liberating hydrogen from hydrazine is… well… it’s how rockets work. It’s really, really hot. And dangerous. If I do it in an oxygen atmosphere, the hot and newly liberated hydrogen will explode. There’ll be a lot of H2O at the end, but I’ll be too dead to appreciate it.
At its root, hydrazine is pretty simple. The Germans used it as far back as World War II for rocket-assisted fighter fuel (and occasionally blew themselves up with it).
All you have to do is run it over a catalyst (which I can extract from the MDV engine) and it will turn into nitrogen and hydrogen. I’ll spare you the chemistry, but the end result is that five molecules of hydrazine becomes five molecules of harmless N2 and ten molecules of lovely H2. During this process, it goes through an intermediate step of being ammonia. Chemistry, being the sloppy bitch it is, ensures there’ll be some ammonia that doesn’t react with the hydrazine, so it’ll just stay ammonia. You like the smell of ammonia? Well, it’ll be prevalent in my increasingly hellish existence.
The chemistry is on my side. The question now is how do I actually make this reaction happen slowly, and how do I collect the hydrogen? The answer is: I don’t know.
I suppose I’ll think of something. Or die.
Anyway, much more important: I simply can’t abide the replacement of Chrissy with Cindy. Three’s Company may never be the same after this fiasco. Time will tell.
CHAPTER 4
So I ran into a bunch of problems with my water plan.
My idea is to make 600 liters of water (limited by the hydrogen I can get from the hydrazine). That means I’ll need 300 liters of liquid O2.
I can create the O2 easily enough. It takes twenty hours for the MAV fuel plant to fill its 10-liter tank with CO2. The oxygenator can turn it into O2, then the atmospheric regulator will see the O2 content in the Hab is high, and pull it out of the air, storing it in the main O2 tanks. They’ll fill up, so I’ll have to transfer O2 over to the rovers’ tanks and even the space suit tanks as necessary.
But I can’t create it very quickly. At half a liter of CO2 per hour, it will take twenty-five days to make the oxygen I need. That’s longer than I’d like.
Also, there’s the problem of storing the hydrogen. The air tanks of the Hab, the rovers, and all the space suits add up to exactly 374 liters of storage. To hold all the materials for water, I would need a whopping 900 liters of storage.
I considered using one of the rovers as a “tank.” It would certainly be big enough, but it just isn’t designed to hold in that much pressure. It’s made to hold (you guessed it) one atmosphere. I need vessels that can hold fifty times that much. I’m sure a rover would burst.
The best way to store the ingredients of water is to make them be water. So what’s what I’ll have to do.
The concept is simple, but the execution will be incredibly dangerous.
Every twenty hours, I’ll have 10 liters of CO2 thanks to the MAV fuel plant. I’ll vent it into the Hab via the highly scientific method of detaching the tank from the MAV landing struts, bringing it into the Hab, then opening the valve until it’s empty.
The oxygenator will turn it into oxygen in its own time.
Then, I’ll release hydrazine, very slowly, over the iridium catalyst, to turn it into N2 and H2. I’ll direct the hydrogen to a small area and burn it.
As you can see, this plan provides many opportunities for me to die in a fiery explosion.
Firstly, hydrazine is some serious death. If I make any mistakes, there’ll be nothing left but the “Mark Watney Memorial Crater” where the Hab once stood.
Presuming I don’t fuck up with the hydrazine, there’s still the matter of burning hydrogen. I’m going to be setting a fire. In the Hab. On purpose.
If you asked every engineer at NASA what the worst scenario for the Hab was, they’d all answer “fire.” If you asked them what the result would be, they’d answer “death by fire.”
But if I can pull it off, I’ll be making water continuously, with no need to store hydrogen or oxygen. It’ll be mixed into the atmosphere as humidity, but the water reclaimer will pull it out.
I don’t even have to perfectly match the hydrazine end of it with the fuel plant CO2 part. There’s plenty of oxygen in the Hab, and plenty more in reserve. I just need to make sure not to make so much water I run myself out of O2.
I hooked up the MAV fuel plant to the Hab’s power supply. Fortunately they both use the same voltage. It’s chugging away, collecting CO2 for me.
Half-ration for dinner. All I accomplished today was thinking up a plan that’ll kill me, and that doesn’t take much energy.
I’m going to finish off the last of Three’s Company tonight. Frankly, I like Mr. Furley more than the Ropers.
This may be my last entry.
I’ve known since Sol 6 there was a good chance I’d die here. But I figured it would be when I ran out of food. I didn’t think it would be this early.
I’m about to fire up the hydrazine.
Our mission was designed knowing that anything might need maintenance, so I have plenty of tools. Even in a space suit, I was able to pry the access panels off the MDV and get at the six hydrazine tanks. I set them in the shadow of a rover to keep them from heating up too much. There’s more shade and a cooler temperature near the Hab, but fuck that. If they’re going to blow up, they can blow up a rover, not my house.
Then I pried out the reaction chamber. It took some work and I cracked the damn thing in half, but I got it out. Lucky for me I don’t need a proper fuel reaction. In fact, I really, super-duper don’t want a proper fuel reaction.
I brought the reaction chamber in. I briefly considered only bringing one tank of hydrazine in at a time to reduce risk. But some back-of-the-napkin math told me even one tank was enough to blow the whole Hab up. So I brought them all in. Why not?
The tanks have manual vent valves. I’m not 100 percent sure what they’re for. Certainly we were never expected to use them. I think they’re there to release pressure during the many quality checks done during construction and before fueling. Whatever the reason, I have valves to work with. All it takes is a wrench.
I liberated a spare water hose from the water reclaimer. With some thread torn out of a uniform (sorry, Johanssen), I attached it to the valve output. Hydrazine is a liquid, so all I have to do is lead it to the reaction chamber (more of a “reaction bowl” now).
Meanwhile, the MAV fuel plant is still working. I’ve already brought in one tank of CO2, vented it, and returned it for refilling.
So there are no more excuses. It’s time to start making water.
If you find the charred remains of the Hab, it means I did something wrong. I’m copying this log over to both rovers, so it’s more likely it’ll survive.
Here goes nothin’.
Well, I didn’t die.
First thing I did was put on the inner lining of my EVA suit. Not the bulky suit itself, just the inner clothing I wear under it, including the gloves and booties. Then I got an oxygen mask from the medical supplies and some lab goggles from Vogel’s chem kit. Almost all of my body was protected and I was breathing canned air.
Why? Because hydrazine is very toxic. If I breathe too much of it, I’ll get major lung problems. If I get it on my skin, I’ll have chemical burns for the rest of my life. I wasn’t taking any chances.