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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.'"
They must be taking the piss.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
NASA is beginning a secret drug testing program.
30 Liters per day? Damn...
In other news, Management at NASA has announced that coffee for employees will now not only be free, but mandatory.
It's just a wee amount to ask for.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
all they need is to hold an on-going kegger. I'm sure they will have no problems in this area.
It's the Golden Age of Space Exploration!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
In fact, this is all a part of NASA's effort to develop the most intensive watersports programs ever conceived...
Bow-ties are cool.
They are just trying to sap our precious bodily fluids!
Perfect reason to write a project proposal with a couple of million bucks in budget. All down the drain now with this kind of simple solution. Contractors are not going to be happy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Why didn't they need urine when I had kidney stones. I could have supplied NASA with all the urine myself.
"Contractor Tells NASA To Piss Off"
Proverbs 21:19
Because it's not just about the toilet, but what happens to the waste after that. They need to extract and reuse the water...
For once the troll post is Insightful.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
30 Liters a day? Man...if they don't manage to collect that, they're going to be pissed. What's even more disconcerting is that I'm sure the Number One guy at NASA is a wee bit worried about the results. He was overheard telling the Orion project manager, "You're in over your head on this one."
Hopefully additional information will be leaked so the true details of this story can be flushed out.
Who is the lucky person at NASA who gets to receive all the urine they get and prep them?
I just sent my resume and a teaser bottle of piss.
It's probably more difficult to get a badger to piss in a bottle than a human. It would also take a lot of badgers to generate 30 liters per day. I suppose a polar bear would generate more, but that causes other problems such as a shortage of interns to feed the bear.
Interior smooth-looking office. Mr Feldman behind a desk, Mr Martin in front of it. Both point to a sign on the desk: 'Life Insurance Ltd'.
Martin: Good morning. I've been in touch with you about the, er, life insurance...
Feldman: Ah yes, did you bring the um ... the specimen of your um ... and so on, and so on?
Martin: Yes I did. It's in the car. There's rather a lot.
Feldman: Good, good.
Martin: Do you really need twelve gallons?
Feldman: No, no, not really.
Martin: Do you test it?
Feldman: No.
Martin: Well, why do you want it?
Feldman: Well, we do it to make sure that you're serious about wanting insurance, I mean, if you're not, you won't spend a couple of months filling up that enormous churn with mmm, so on and so on...
Martin: Shall I bring it in?
Feldman: Good Lord no. Throw it away.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Where are they going to store all that urine? I remember a study on pregnancy where they needed real urine, which apparently breaks down rather rapidly, so they kept it all in the fridge. It's a bit scary to think of NASA working out of a giant refrigerator of pee. And I feel sorry for the guy who got an advanced degree, got a job at NASA, and is now the pee handler.
Affordable Health Coverage
It's probably a covert drug test.
*puts on tinfoil hat*
Have you ever see the earth from space...on weed???
Maybe they're just looking to cut costs? Yellow River Synthetic Urine is available for $12 for 90cc. Computes to about $4000/day for their needs. https://www.whizzinator.com/order.html (NSFW)
I'm going to tell me son to look into this. He was pretty excited recently when he discovered he could sell his semen for $250 a pop.
His urine might not fetch as much but he's got more of it.
It's also about the corrosion, and the solids that gunk up the line over time.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
But who the hell wants to take Kevin Costner with them into orbit?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
In addition to what other commenters have pointed out, there's also the matter of mass budgets. An over-engineered urine disposal system would add unnecessary mass and volume to the spacecraft, a system where ounces matter.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Of course, this is not the first large scale industrial use of urine. A venerable brand of pharmacy industry estrogen replacement treatment for women ( Premarin) is made from vast quantities of horse (pregnant mare) urine. The horses spend their pregnancy hooked to a catheter. There are lots of synthetic versions now, of course.
In Enterprise they had normal water showers. Sonic showers were mentioned in the others.
1 4/\/\ 1337
People with access to chloroform and an airlock?
...for the first mission to Uranus.
The original memo is online here http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/07/dont_flush_dona.html
This was a better deal in the good old days before law suits ruined everyones fun. For developing the shuttle toilet (ISS uses the russian toilet) there were company sanctioned keg parties after hours in the company park to help the collection along. True story. This was at the CT site, before the TX existed.
The article doesn't get into much more than the toilet, but the full cycle will be to feed that into WCS (waste collection system) which will then go into the OGA (ox gen assembly), with end result being O2 to breath and H which will probably be tossed overboard unless they decide to add the sabatier unit to it which will take CO2 and H (plus catalysts)to produce water and methane. The theory behind it is that up to 90% of the O2 needed for a trip to Mars can be gotten from personal water intake and humidity.
... if they collect all of this urine, is there not a job that requires someone pour all of it into the toilet?.... I guess, could you say that it really is a piss pour job?
Because it's not just about the toilet, but what happens to the waste after that. They need to extract and reuse the water...
Besides which - if you're developing a system responsible for the handling, recycling, or disposal of human urine, the best thing to test it with is human urine. They're not going to be using this thing to dispose of canola oil, that's not what it's for.
Bow-ties are cool.
R. Kelly
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
Have you ever seen an elephant take a piss? Whoa! There is a lot, it comes out quick, and, for a number of reasons, I do NOT want to be the guy trying to get it into a bucket.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
"Be right back guys, gotta perform some NASA-level rocket science"
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
"Operation Goldenflow"... (for urinalysis, as described by Sailors...)
But, at first, I thought a contractor required this urine. SO, if they have a performance clause involved, and don't/can't get enough, will they be subject to fines for "piss-poor performance"? (LOL!)
Also, reminds me of "Prior proper planning prevents piss-poor performance"...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
This guy is number one in the field!
Plants love urine if it is diluted with water at between 5-10:1. Seriously. I have been using it on all of my plants in an effort to cut down costs on fertilizer and to reduce toilet flushes. Urine contains almost all nutrients that plants need: nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and lots of micronutrients and B vitamins. My plants are flourishing on the stuff.
From the article: The memo seeking daily contributions from July 21 to July 31 was not meant to go public, he said. Yeah, you really think "NASA asks for urine" is not gonna hit the news?
...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
Much more frightening than any of the drug dealers was the cargo operation across the street from our office, which was a front for an arms dealer. He owned a bunch of Boeing 707 cargo jets (and a 727 with a tricked-out interior for his private use), all parked at a beautiful state-of-the-art hangar which had his office on the top floor. By sheer, blind coincidence one of his bodyguards was actually a childhood acquaintance from my hometown, and he used to come by my house occasionally for a beer, and we'd trade stories of the bizarre goings-on on MIA north side. His boss was one of the largest weapons dealers on the planet and actually had long lists of people who wanted him dead, so consequently always traveled in an armored Benz with an entourage of bodyguards. Such was his legitimate fear of assassination that he had in the hangar an elevator into which his chauffeur would drive his car, and which would take the car directly up into his office. He didn't dare take the chance that someone could gain access to his car in the parking lot and install a bomb.
This gentleman was Syrian or Lebanese if I remember correctly, had extensive contacts in the Middle East, and played both sides of the fence with equal facility (one of his jets had to be escorted to safety in the Gulf by Israeli F-4's after being threatened by Iranian fighters). From what I understand, much of his business was in South and Central America, hence his Miami HQ. He was in a vastly more lucrative business than any mere cartel leader could imagine, and dealt legitimately with governments on a scale that would make a coke dealer green with envy. What's more, he did a LOT of work for Uncle Sam when plausible deniability was called for, so he was in absolutely no danger of being shut down by the feds. I later heard that he had been the factotum in the Iran-Contra Scandal, the party who had actually procured and shipped the Stinger missiles to Iran. Just this direct glimpse into the dirty side of global politics made a huge impression on me. Before that, it really had been an abstract concept, things you only read about, but to hear first-hand some of the things that governments are capable of was horrifying and abhorrent. Gangsters are saints compared to some of our elected officials.