Word: oxygenate
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...After the Bush show ended last Thursday, singer-guitarist Gavin Rossdale collapsed and paramedics had to hook the British hunk up to oxygen...
...launching it with its tanks empty of fuel and its cabin empty of crew. Landing on the surface, the craft would begin pumping Martian atmosphere--which is 95% carbon dioxide--into a reaction chamber, where it would be exposed to hydrogen and broken down into methane, water and oxygen. Methane and oxygen make a first-rate rocket fuel; water and oxygen are necessary human fuels. All these consumables could be pumped into tanks inside the ship and stored there...
This may all sound great, but there are a few hurdles. Putting a simple satellite into orbit--with no oxygen, life support or return trip necessary--already costs an astronomical $10,000 per lb. And that doesn't include the cost of insuring rich and possibly litigious passengers. John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists acerbically suggests the entire group of entrepreneurs trying to corner the space-tourism market have between them "just enough money to blow up one rocket...
...however, if genetic engineers find a way to intervene. What slows the human body down is less the architecture of its skeleton than the chemistry of its muscles. The key to speed is making muscles contract faster, and the key to that is gassing them up with as much oxygen as possible. "About 80% of the energy used to run a mile," explains physiologist Peter Weyand of Harvard University, "comes directly from oxygen...
Muscles process oxygen through cellular components known as the mitochondria. Human mitochondria take up only about 3% of the space in a cell. But in animals that run the fastest, mitochondria are far bigger; the mitochondria of an antelope--an animal that easily runs a 2-min. mile and does so in wispy mountain air 7,000 ft. up--are three times larger than ours. "If you could genetically engineer humans to have more mitochondria, bigger hearts and more blood vessels," says Weyand, "we might run about 40 m.p.h...