Humanity's ambition to live beyond Earth has always collided with a fundamental question: how do you carry enough of everything you need across the void? Two research teams from Texas have brought that question closer to an answer, winning NASA approval to test a device called MARS-C that would pull fuel and oxygen directly from the Martian environment itself. In brief windows of simulated Martian gravity aboard a diving aircraft, the electrolyzer will attempt to prove that the chemistry of survival can be borrowed from the very world we hope to inhabit.