I don't understand your point, if you are claiming that O2 is not abundant in space, I think the idea is that we also find an ice asteroid. Where there is water, there is oxygen.

Edit: I assume people are missing my reasoning. Yes, water requires energy to split, but assuming you are doing some other process that ends up with a resulting split anyway, you could use the hydrocarbons as a fuel source at that stage. Think recycling, not energy production.

You can produce oxygen from water, iron ore (O'Neill and other sci-fi writers somehow missed that astronauts brought back top quality iron ore from the moon,) stony rocks, etc.

To do it from water for instance you could use electricity to split up the H2O molecules; you could directly use the resulting O2 or you could use the H2 to reduce the iron ore back to H2O and thus recycle the H2. Maybe you get electricity from solar panels or a nuclear reactor.

You could burn this with cosmic hydrocarbons but you have only accomplished energy storage as opposed to an energy source. You are then competing with a sun that shines all the time and every other energy storage technology as well as nuclear fission, fusion, and decay.

The oxygen rich environment is the gift we get from plants here on Earth, ultimately they have stored a lot of "energy" in the atmosphere which we can tap.

Future wildcatters will see asteroid hydrocarbons as the material to make human bodies and cattle, everything from wood to plastics to pharmaceuticals -- every bit as much of a gold rush, but not a new energy source.

If you could make plastics from asteroid materials you could blow very large films and coat them with layers of metals and semiconductors and thus function as solar sails if not energy collectors -- these could sail to their destinations on their own power, say to be installed at the Earth-Sun L1 point to fight global warming.

Anyhow it took people a long time to get oxygen right. Cave men "mastered" fire but people couldn't make steel commercially until people understood that 80% of the atmosphere is inert stuff that goes along for the ride.

Wait, how do you reduce iron ore back into h2o ?

Hydrogen smelting.

http://www.fchea.org/in-transition/2019/11/25/hydrogen-in-th...

Iron Ore is FE + O.

I forget exactly the proportions, but... the entire point of iron-processing is to turn rust back into raw Iron (FE) by removing the O from it.

So where does the H come from?

Yeah but you have to expend energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. So burning hydrocarbons using water doesn't make much sense.

Imagine you're making a rocket engine, and both fuel and combustion products have high molecular weight. A rough example is burning CO (carbon monoxide) in O2, with reasoning being "both of them can be obtained from martian athmosphere". So the fuel isn't great, and specific impulse - Isp - is low, but if you add a relatively low-molecular weight component to fuel - like water - you can hope to have greater positive effect from lowering average molecular mass of combustion products than negative effect from adding an inert component.

That's partially illustrated by nuclear hydrogen engines - there is no chemistry, and the gas coming from the nozzle is actually colder than what conventional chemical rocket engine produces. Hydrogen doesn't participates in any transformations, it's purely a working fluid, yet Isp is about twice as good as with LOX-LH2 engines.

So at least adding water to burning process might sometimes improve the result.

Recycling what?

Let's say you have oxygen from somewhere. You use the oxygen to burn hydrocarbons, to make energy and water and CO2.

To turn that into a closed cycle, you need to regenerate the water and CO2 into oxygen, to burn more hydrocarbons. The only way to do that is to add energy - on earth, we use solar energy via photosynthesis, but in space, you could use solar or nuclear energy via some chemical process.

But if you have the energy to regenerate the oxygen, why not just use it? Why make oxygen and then burn the hydrocarbons?

And why bother burning more hydrocarbons when a by-product of the regeneration process is carbon, a perfect fuel!

Photosynthesis is a perfect example, I know of a handful of useful chemicals that today come from the cultivation of specific plants. Food production is the other obvious one use case for it. If you're byproduct is oxygen, well, can use it for whatever you want.

Water is a product of combustion. It is what you are left with after the combustion has already happened, i.e. the oxygen has already been reduced.

Where do the hydrocarbons on the asteroids come from in that view? I’m curious because on earth the hydrocarbons come from life.

A lot of carbon is made in stars and collects in dust clouds that condense into objects.

Close to the sun volatile substances such as hydrocarbons and water got cooked off so the Earth is still a dry place rich in aluminum and silicon compared to objects outside the frost line (Jupiter) which tend to have water, carbon dioxide, and hydrocarbons as major components.