And where is that raw methane going to come from? Its not like there is a lake of methane you can just suck up on Mars. What about the oxygen needed to burn that methane?
You are going to need to produce 10,000x more energy than your fuel contains to make the fuel, and that energy has to come from somewhere.
> And where is that raw methane going to come from? Its not like there is a lake of methane you can just suck up on Mars. What about the oxygen needed to burn that methane?
Are you even attempting to Google these questions before posting them here with such an aggressive tone? Manufacturing oxygen on Mars is demonstrated engineering [1]. Manufacturing methane, theoretically sound and demonstrated in the lab [2].
This is what I meant by the aggressive strain of ignorance having overtaken the science with popular astronautics [3]. Some folks read a hot take on Musk and what Hawthorne hasn't done, ignore the thousands of scientists demonstrating actual technology a hundred million miles away, and then assume they're vindicated when the rest of us get tired of arguing with willful denseness.
Even your sources are giving multiple years of 24/7 operation under ideal conditions to produce what is necessary for a single launch, that doesn't seem very reasonable to me. How much energy are we able to actually generate on Mars? From what I understand solar panels are not that great in the Mars environment. And any sort of material processing is going to take a whole lot of energy.
I just don't see a Mars colony as a reasonable goal without sending potentially thousands of rockets full of tools and materials, which is too expensive to do without an already existent space mining and processing industry.
You are going to need to produce 10,000x more energy than your fuel contains to make the fuel, and that energy has to come from somewhere.