Space Colonies and Water

[Mafty]

So how do space colonies get their water? its shown that the soil and metal can get harvested from the asteroids; and the plants and wildlife can be brought up in limited qualities from earth, but where does the colonies water come from?

[MythSearcher]

So how do space colonies get their water? its shown that the soil and metal can get harvested from the asteroids; and the plants and wildlife can be brought up in limited qualities from earth, but where does the colonies water come from?

You have quite a lot of water if you are mining the Moon, 5.6 ± 2.9% H2O by weight according to this page, and the estimate went up recently(2020/10/27 news) because of this: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa ... e-of-moon/
"Data from this location reveal water in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million – roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water – trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface."
You also get water from asteroids and comets, also, you don't really need to directly get water, as long as you get Hydrogen and Oxygen, or OH, you can make water while you burn those together while using them to generate power.
Hydrogen is pretty abundant in space, Oxygen isn't as much but still pretty abundant.

[John-Luck Pickerd]

Asteroid belt contains quite alot of water. Lots of the "rocks" there are actually ice, or substance that can become water.

And if you want to move even futher away, like Jupiter, the moon Europa is literally covered in ice and water.

[Seto Kaiba]

As MythSearcher noted, you can find a fair amount of water in things like asteroids and comets. The Federation has a fair amount of asteroid mining going on, even transferring large and particularly resource-rich asteroids into less distant orbits for easier access. A fair amount of the water in the colonies probably came from resource asteroids like Luna II.

The Jupiter Energy Fleet could also be responsible for shipping water resources to the colonies, given that there are a number of Jupiter's moons (like Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa) that have massive deposits of water ice that can be accessed fairly easily from surface mining. Callisto and Ganymede would be especally tempting water sources since both moons are nearly 1/2 ice by mass.

Ganymede would be the most likely place for the Jupiter Energy Fleet to have surface installations on the Jupiter end of its run, since it has the highest surface gravity of all the Jovian moons at 0.146g (a bit less than Luna's 0.165g).

[MythSearcher]

As MythSearcher noted, you can find a fair amount of water in things like asteroids and comets. The Federation has a fair amount of asteroid mining going on, even transferring large and particularly resource-rich asteroids into less distant orbits for easier access. A fair amount of the water in the colonies probably came from resource asteroids like Luna II.

The Jupiter Energy Fleet could also be responsible for shipping water resources to the colonies, given that there are a number of Jupiter's moons (like Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa) that have massive deposits of water ice that can be accessed fairly easily from surface mining. Callisto and Ganymede would be especally tempting water sources since both moons are nearly 1/2 ice by mass.

Ganymede would be the most likely place for the Jupiter Energy Fleet to have surface installations on the Jupiter end of its run, since it has the highest surface gravity of all the Jovian moons at 0.146g (a bit less than Luna's 0.165g).

I also thought of the Jupiter fleets, but with the limited amount they can carry and the time required for the round trip, I have doubts as to how much water is carried by them.
Taking the Jupitris as an example for estimations, taking the most lazy calculations of a 2km length, 500m height, 500m width cuboid (way more than what you have in the images), you get 0.5km^3, or 500 million m^3. For water, that's 500 million tons.(the actual available volume it likely less than 30% of that)
Sounded a lot, but building a Model 1 O'Neill Cylinder requires 50000 tons of water(this is not the minimal, but I'd say you do need extra for redundancy), and that is only for 10000 population, as opposed to the more common Model 4 we should have something around 10 million pop(200k to 20 mil according to O'Neill for twin colonies, 30 mil in Gundam which we both agreed will be nothing like what they showed on screen)
So I will assume a simple 1000 fold increase in water requirement, and thus 50,000,000 tons of water per a pair of colony newly built , so the Jupitris can bring back 20 colonies worth of water per around 7 years in the beginning of UC, every 4 years before the OYW and 1 year after it until sometime in 0089(where the return trip became like a few months) If it only carried water and no other resources, which is unlikely because its main cargo should be He3.

[Seto Kaiba]

I also thought of the Jupiter fleets, but with the limited amount they can carry and the time required for the round trip, I have doubts as to how much water is carried by them.
Taking the Jupitris as an example for estimations, taking the most lazy calculations of a 2km length, 500m height, 500m width cuboid (way more than what you have in the images), you get 0.5km^3, or 500 million m^3. For water, that's 500 million tons.(the actual available volume it likely less than 30% of that)
Sounded a lot, but building a Model 1 O'Neill Cylinder requires 50000 tons of water(this is not the minimal, but I'd say you do need extra for redundancy), and that is only for 10000 population, as opposed to the more common Model 4 we should have something around 10 million pop(200k to 20 mil according to O'Neill for twin colonies, 30 mil in Gundam which we both agreed will be nothing like what they showed on screen)
So I will assume a simple 1000 fold increase in water requirement, and thus 50,000,000 tons of water per a pair of colony newly built , so the Jupitris can bring back 20 colonies worth of water per around 7 years in the beginning of UC, every 4 years before the OYW and 1 year after it until sometime in 0089(where the return trip became like a few months) If it only carried water and no other resources, which is unlikely because its main cargo should be He3.

Granted, if there were only one ship doing those round trips it'd be impossible or at least impractical for the Jupiter Energy Fleet to be involved in providing other resources besides just Helium-3. However, Jupitris was just one ship of a class with at least half a dozen known ships (and very probably more besides), all of which were doing that same four year cycle, and there were various ancillary support shops in the fleet as well.

The Jupitris-class is noted to have frankly massive cargo capacity independent of the twenty outboard storage tanks for Helium-3, which were said to have enough fuel for a massive military force like the Crossbone Vanguard to operate for two entire years. It's possible that some of the ships were tanking up entirely on water for construction of colonies in the missions between Helium-3 resupply runs or that their support ships were carrying mined water to colonies.

[MythSearcher]

Granted, if there were only one ship doing those round trips it'd be impossible or at least impractical for the Jupiter Energy Fleet to be involved in providing other resources besides just Helium-3. However, Jupitris was just one ship of a class with at least half a dozen known ships (and very probably more besides), all of which were doing that same four year cycle, and there were various ancillary support shops in the fleet as well.

The Jupitris-class is noted to have frankly massive cargo capacity independent of the twenty outboard storage tanks for Helium-3, which were said to have enough fuel for a massive military force like the Crossbone Vanguard to operate for two entire years. It's possible that some of the ships were tanking up entirely on water for construction of colonies in the missions between Helium-3 resupply runs or that their support ships were carrying mined water to colonies.

Clarification, I am not saying it is the only ship, but it is the biggest ship class and I am using its size to estimate the carrying capacity, which I already covered way bigger than what is shown. You can estimate the size of the Jupitris and will know that my 2km X 500m X 500m is way bigger than it is.
I don't think there's a lot of Jupitris before the OYW as well, because the one rebuilt after 0088 was called Jupitris II.

The Zeon Jupiter fleet ships are also much smaller: https://gundam.fandom.com/wiki/Jupiter_Energy_Fleet
Judging from the pumped up Musai class, these ships seems to be around 1~1.2km in length, but much slimmer than the Jupitris. You can fit 8 of these in my estimation with room to space.

I am just saying there are so much other places much closer and more energy efficient to travel between, you really don't need to go all the way to Jupiter to get water.
Its like when I want a glass of water, I don't use my kitchen, or the fountain in the corner of the street, but all the way to the park's pond on the other side of town where I have to drive down for like 20 mins and required a return trip.

[John-Luck Pickerd]

I mean, if we are talking about how to get jovian or asteroid water back to Earth, then why bother putting it on the ship? Cant we just strap a rocket or load that big piece of ice onto a mass driver and launch it toward somewhere closer to Earth's orbit, so that when it arrives, it can be captured by Earth's gravity (hopefully in a stable orbit instead of falling down toward Earth)?

Hell, if you a re worry about course correction, let it accompany one of the energy ships. The ship can put some maneuvering thrusters on the ice and control it.

[MythSearcher]

I mean, if we are talking about how to get jovian or asteroid water back to Earth, then why bother putting it on the ship? Cant we just strap a rocket or load that big piece of ice onto a mass driver and launch it toward somewhere closer to Earth's orbit, so that when it arrives, it can be captured by Earth's gravity (hopefully in a stable orbit instead of falling down toward Earth)?

Hell, if you a re worry about course correction, let it accompany one of the energy ships. The ship can put some maneuvering thrusters on the ice and control it.

Considering the Albion's laser propulsion system, where it was originally used on commercial ships with standard trajectories.(It is not a photon drive, but a big laser array situated on the Moon that will shoot lasers at the fusion fuel the ships shoot out from behind and trigger the fusion reaction for thrust) Your method will work pretty well, but still, it seems to be rather inefficient compared to setting up mass drivers on the Moon and just shoot ice up to the mass collectors like all the other materials they are getting from the moon.
Granted, they took Juno from the asteroid belt and moved it to L3, renaming it Lunar II(which likely also contain a certain amount of water). So they have all the technology to do what you are saying.
As the Asteroid belt is still much closer than Jupiter(The closest Jupiter is to the Earth is still over 100 million km further than the far point of the asteroid belt, meaning at least about a 25% increase in travelling distance) I don't see a reasonable rationale to transport water from Jupiter. It makes more sense to stop by the asteroid belt stations/bases(which they have many and Axis is only one of them) and fill the emptied propellant tanks with water, use that as propellant and use whatever is left when they reached the Earth sphere.

[baka8roukanako]

I'm more worried about their water recycling... There is simply no way of removing every chemical during waste water treatment. Imagine drinking that chemical cocktail full of birth control hormones, painkillers and recreational drug residue...

[Dark Duel]

We're talking about a society that has successfully colonized the Earth/Moon Lagrange Points and built cities on the moon. It's not entirely impossible that they would have a means of water purification more effective than what real-world technology is currently capable of.

[MythSearcher]

I'm more worried about their water recycling... There is simply no way of removing every chemical during waste water treatment. Imagine drinking that chemical cocktail full of birth control hormones, painkillers and recreational drug residue...

I'd say all you need is to pass your water through a distillation plant, or a nuclear fusion reactor core that breaks down your molecules to their basic elements.

Distillation can remove a lot of the chemicals that do not have a boiling point close to 100 degrees C.

It you get any drugs that have such boiling points, ionize the thing, the molecules will turn into ions and separate into elements, a simple magnetic field will be able to separate those elements because they have different charge and mass. You also break down all those complicated chemical compounds like hormones and drugs. And if you are still unsure, distillation of whatever turns back to liquid will now yield a much more clear separation in boiling points.

[Seto Kaiba]

I'm more worried about their water recycling... There is simply no way of removing every chemical during waste water treatment. Imagine drinking that chemical cocktail full of birth control hormones, painkillers and recreational drug residue...

When all is said and done, all you have to do is apply multiple methods of water purification the way that every modern treatment plant already does. Various compounds can be added to water being treated to cause contaminants held in solution to collect together into particules large enough for conventional sedimentation and filtration to be effective in removing them. Pressure filtration is also an option for removing particularly stubborn dissolved contaminants. That can be followed up by polymer membrane filtration or ion-exchange filtration. Steam distillation would be easy for the colonies to achieve given their massive solar collectors and fusion reactors, or using centrifugal purification to cause heavier molecular contaminants to settle out, and there's always bioremediation with selected benign microorganisms (poss. tailored for the purpose at this point) to remove any particularly exotic nasties.

Or a really paranoid method could just be to heat the water to a plasma so that every dissolved solid in it is destroyed.

[MythSearcher]

Steam distillation would be easy for the colonies to achieve given their massive solar collectors and fusion reactors, or using centrifugal purification to cause heavier molecular contaminants to settle out, and there's always bioremediation with selected benign microorganisms (poss. tailored for the purpose at this point) to remove any particularly exotic nasties.

Or a really paranoid method could just be to heat the water to a plasma so that every dissolved solid in it is destroyed.

Come to think of it, since they are using solar power, and likely don't really care about efficiency that much(they can just increase the mirrors and use fusion reactors for the shortage, if any.) they can actually do distillation while generating power and use the old school steam turbine for electricity generation.