Producing fuel from Mars Resources is a piece of cake compared to some of the things done in the chemical industry. The gas phase CH4 reaction needed predates much of modern industrial technology yet people want to compare this with harvesting tiny amounts of water from permanantly frozen soil as if there is any similarity in difficulty. I have no doubt as a chemical engineer that the gas phase reaction can be made to work with relatively simple equipment. I had plenty of doubt the ISS would ever be useful as a manufacturing base or even in developing space based purification technology. I'll even bet you can recover water form lunar soil and use it, I just won't bet it's going to be cost effective.

But you know what, it's a testable hypothesis. I have no problem with funding a robotic competition for insitu resource utilization. Develope a probe to convert lunar soil to fuel and one to convert Martian atmosphere to fuel with a cost cap of 1 billion. Let's see if either will work and what the costs will be. I'll bet jaws will drop at the cost of the lunar probe compared to the Mars probe. The cost will be minimal compared to building a lunar base on flawed assumptions.

Regards,
Mark