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Chemical engineering
Titan is a chemistry set: air that is mostly nitrogen, seas of methane, bedrock of ice, and almost no free oxygen.
Everything the settlers build, burn and breathe starts as methane, nitrogen or water ice. The pages here follow those molecules from the sea and the ice to the pad, the plant and the lab.
Methalox from Titan
The ascent vehicle lifts off at 109 tonnes on 14 tonnes of methane from the sea and 50 tonnes of oxygen from the ice.
Water, oxygen and electrolysis
Kraken Shore mines Titan's ice and splits it into the oxygen people breathe and the hydrogen the fusion transports throw out of their nozzles.
Kraken Mare and Titan's seas
Kraken Mare is a sea of liquid hydrocarbon at least 400,000 km² across, and Kraken Shore stands on the one coast where Cassini measured how deep it is.
Building for 94 K and 1.5 bar
Titan's air pushes in on a Kraken Shore building harder than the room's air pushes out, so the town is built like a stone arch, not a balloon.
Enceladus plumes and the ocean
Enceladus sprays its ocean into space at about 400 m/s from the south pole, faster than the 239 m/s needed to leave the moon.
Planetary protection
Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty requires explorers to avoid harmful contamination of other worlds, and the Enceladus station keeps to it by never touching the ocean.
Also: Nuclear engineering · The Saturn system · Propulsion · The fleet