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NASA Contractor Needs Urine
Apparently, NASA sent a memo to its employees at the Johnson Space Center asking for their urine so they, NASA, could use it to test the Orion space capsule. How much urine? 30 liters per day, including weekends. Disposal of urine for up to six months would be required if Orion is to work as planned.
Alert reader nettamere adds a link to story at Discovery.com, excerpting: "Donations will be treated with a chemical that can hold solid particulates in the liquid so they don't clog up the tubing in microgravity, said Leo Makowski, company spokesman for Hamilton Sundstrand, a contractor designing the new spaceship's toilet. ... "It's difficult to come up with a faux urine, explained NASA's Jim Lewis, the systems manager overseeing development of Orion's potty. 'That's why we depend on collections.'"
A professor I used to work for did research on the cryogenic preservation of sperm. The grad student who was working on this project wanted to run some initial tests, and we were not yet shipments of an appropriate animal substitute, so he acquired some samples himself.
This is actually a big problem; urine disposal is significant over time because it can cause serious corrosion.
There was a fleet of airplanes...I can't remember whose now...cargo planes...They had to be refitted, and a significant amount of redesign done, because the design of the restrooms coupled with air turbulence, ended up with a significant amount of piss dripping down on to one of the primary structural braces, and, over time, weakening it to the point of needing replacement.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...so read this long, rambling post only if you have an interest in aircraft and aviation. You have been warned.
Your comment reminded me of an incident that occurred at Miami International when I worked there in 1980-82. Some background: I worked on the north side of the airport for an FBO (handler of private and corporate aircraft) and I didn't know it at the time, but MIA had quite a reputation among aviation buffs for the large number of classic aircraft parked all over the north side, including any number of DC-3's, and incredibly, a Lockheed Constellation parked at "Corrosion Corner", the northwest corner near the fire station. When a private collector (rumored to be John Travolta) bought it and flew it out, there were hundreds of people lined up with cameras to see the stately old beauty take to the air after years sitting on the ramp. Disappointingly, I only knew it was leaving when I saw it climbing gracefully away, and so didn't get a picture of this magnificent aircraft; I never imagined that I'd ever see one flying.
The north side, the entire length of which bordered NW 36th Street, was home to dozens of -quite literally- fly-by-night operations; charter companies ranging in size from small operations with one or two light twins, up through outfits with old DC-3's still in perfect operating condition, to larger cargo operations with jets, mostly DC-8's. The smaller, one and two plane outfits operated mostly between South Florida and the Bahamas, almost exclusively at night. More on that in a bit.
Next door to where I worked, one of these charter companies had a single, beautifully-maintained DC-3, and one morning while I was inspecting the ramp, I glanced at the bird and noticed that there were enormous holes in the belly of the aircraft. Turns out that the night before, they had been flying a cargo of old car batteries when they encountered severe turbulence, and the batteries started leaking all over the cabin. They didn't notice the damage until they had actually landed and parked the aircraft, at which time they saw the ground through the huge, corroded holes, and found that the control lines had been almost completely eaten through. If they had kept flying for another ten minutes or so, they would have crashed.
At the time I worked there, the "Cocaine Cowboys" (the Medellin and Cali cartels) were just coming up to speed. "Miami Vice" had just come on the air, but some of the stuff I saw at the airport would have been laughed off as unbelievable if it had been in the script of the TV series. Miami in general, and Miami International in particular, was swimming in cocaine. MIA is the major gateway for Latin American carriers into the U.S., and in those days before the widespread crack epidemic, a day didn't go by without some major drama, and there was a wild, almost frontier feel to the north side, with all the goings-on at these little (and big) operations. The difference between charter and cargo ops, and the much more genteel terminal, with the bars and bookstores and the palm trees in the parking lots, was as stark as night and day, and most commercial passengers had absolutely zero clue that such a seedy underbelly existed.
- Ever seen 6,000 pounds of cocaine in one place? [raises hand] Air Panama DC-8, gift-wrapped in streamers of yellow crime scene tape, parked next door to our office. The three tons of coke were stuffed into freezers in the cargo hold. Feds crawled all over everybody for weeks. I used to work the midnight shift, and so got quite familiar with many of the charter pilots who were in and out in the wee hours of the morning, on their "cargo" flights to the Bahamas. Imagine my shock when one of them handed me a kilo of cocaine one night, just because I was always polite and courteous to him (hell, I was polite and courteous to everybody; some scary folks frequented north side). He was