Where does oxygen for astronauts come from? Are we just constantly sending rockets with tanks of oxygen up to the ISS?
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The oxygen comes from rocket fuel, and from the spent rocket fuel the astronauts breath out. IE water vapor.
You can make oxygen and hydrogen pretty readily by taking water and running an electric current through it using an anode and cathode. The water splits back into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas.
Believe it or not, oxygen isn’t usually a problem. If you took an astronaut and sealed them up in a tube, they would run into trouble from too much carbon dioxide, long before they ever started to run out of oxygen.
So one of the most critical functions of the air handling systems on something like the ISS, are the CO2 scrubbers that take excess carbon dioxide and chemically react it with another substance to render it inert. Without these scrubbers, the air would become unbreathable within hours, no matter how much oxygen they had left.
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