Governed Parasitic ISRU for Secondary Utility Chemicals at Early Mars Outposts: The LOGUE-10 Ethanol Example — E8 Intelligence Research

Early Mars outposts will require consumable chemicals—disinfectants, solvents, cleaning agents—that cannot be replenished between infrequent resupply missions. Parasitic ISRU is introduced: a systems-engineering concept in which secondary chemical production is hosted on existing propellant infrastructure and governed by explicit life-support subordination gates. The Ethanol Technology for Outpost Habitability (ETOH) framework defines power, water, CO2-priority, and quality gates. Its hardware instantiation, the Logistics-Optimized Generation Unit for Ethanol (LOGUE-10), produces ≥95% v/v ethanol via electrochemical CO2 reduction, drawing ≍1.2% of installed outpost power (1.15% duty-cycle-weighted; ≍3.6% of the post-propellant surplus). A 669-sol governance simulation on a 2 × 40 kWe fission surface-power baseline with stochastic dust storms yields 342.8 L (15.6 L/month) at an optimistic operating point (30% FE, 2.5 V); at the same 1 kW cap the conservative basis (25% FE, 3.5 V) scales Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com