Slashdot Mirror
Urine Passes NASA Taste Test
Ponca City, We love you writes "Astronauts flying aboard space shuttle Endeavour are delivering a device to the International Space Station that may leave you wondering if NASA is taking recycling too far. Among the ship's cargo is a water regeneration system that distills, filters, ionizes, and oxidizes wastewater — including urine — into fresh water for drinking or, as one astronaut puts it, 'will make yesterday's coffee into today's coffee.' The US space agency spent $250M for the water recycling equipment but with the space shuttles due to retire in two years, NASA needed to make sure the station crew would have a good supply of fresh water. The Environmental Control and Life Support Systems uses a purification process called vapor compression distillation: urine is boiled until the water in it turns to steam. In space, there's an additional challenge: steam doesn't rise, so the entire distillation system is spun to create artificial gravity to separate the steam from the brine. The water has been thoroughly tested on Earth, including blind taste tests that pitted recycled urine with similarly treated tap water. 'Some people may think it's downright disgusting, but if it's done correctly, you process water that's purer than what you drink here on Earth,' said Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper."
However, I don't think anybody wants to drink this warm, so better make that piss frosty.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
... they paid two hundred and fifty million dollars?!
Am I the only person who this jumped to mind when when I RTFA?
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Will I take the steam off my piss for granted.
you process water that's purer than what you drink here on Earth. - It might be the case physically/chemically, but not psychologically.... "Look, I'm drinking purified pee and it's tasty!" God...
just wonder why there are so many anonymous cowards in this world....
because it would be a big step forward for worldwide water sanitation.
They were right - the revolution did not get televised. It was posted on YouTube instead. All in 120 characters. SLOOSH!
...no one can hear you steam. Your piss.
Space is a horrible place.
This means the home version is only a few years down the road!
Oh yeah, funny, astronaut pee. But for crying out loud (and losing valuable water in the process), what is so hard to understand about a closed system?
"Going too far" is spending millions of dollars to send precious DHMO to the space station, when there are perfectly good pre-assembled dihydrogen monoxide molecules being blown out into the vacuum.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
It's bad enough that the mainstream media has been acting like a bunch of prepubescent children over the urine recycling, but now Slashdot has to get into the game as well?
"that may leave you wondering if NASA is taking recycling too far"
Uh, nope, it doesn't leave me wondering that at all. In fact, when I first read about it I was rather surprised that the ISS wasn't recycling urine already. Any manned moon-base, or long-duration trip to reach Mars, would absolutely require the recycling of urine.
Better known as 318230.
turn today's brownies into tomorrow's brownies
Why is that so disgusting? All the water you drink was probably pee at some point anyway.
Its a piss take!
Although it makes for a nice Beeb quip, no, it is not too far. Sending water into low-Earth orbit is not cheap (a launch delta-V of ~ 9 km/s) , and sending it to other places like the Moon and Mars is even more expensive. That's why it is necessary to begin testing and using this technology, where it is possible to actually send replenishment water in case something doesn't work properly.
I'd be worried if they were attempting this and they didn't take the recycling far enough.
Earth is also a closed ecosystem where we breath in the burnt remains of food ingested by our neighbors, where tap water is derived from the same lakes and streams that animals use as public toilets. Just because the filtration occurs further away and uses some natural bedrock, doesn't make it any different.
Once you have just steam, it can no longer be considered urine, so drinking water is made from condensed steam
I for one plan on no longer partaking in this twisted backwards environment. Long ago I employed the oil companies to convince the ignorant masses to emit large quantities of CO2 - in an elaborate plot to raise global temperatures and melt the pristine icecaps which I will then route into my drinking water. Furthermore, I will destroy this insane ecosystem that exists in this evil urine drinking manner. You may wonder why I am willing to so freely say this, but what can you do about it? What can you do! mu-hahaha.
anyone know what we were talking about?
When all else fails, try.
My buddy pissed in a beer bottle and capped it off -- left it in my basement for 2 months. I forgot that it was piss and took a large swill, needless to say I was puking piss for the next hour.
given the seal of approval for this pee thing - 'Astronaud Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper'.
im not sure which fuckin reality im in, the one i know, or an alternate sci-fi universe.
Read radical news here
The waste water treatment industry has 3 levels of treatment here on Earth. Primary was what was done in the 60's and before (if any treatment). Solids were ground and held to allow bacteria to digest it (the septic tank method) and it was dumped in the river to dilute it for downstream, with a shot of Chlorine. Then secondary treatment came online in the 70's and later, which is what most municipalities do today, where the solids are filtered out by vacuum or pressure filters and burned or buried, but you'd still be able to tell that the chlorine treated effluent was far from potable.
Finally there is tertiary treatment, which yields water so pure you could drink it (disgusting as it might seem), and this is what is implemented at locations such as Lake Tahoe CA. The water flowing out of the waste water treatment is cleaner than that in the lake itself, after the calcium filtration, etc. There are also de-nitrogenation and de-phosphoration processes to "scrub" the effluent of excess Nitrogen and Phosphorus.
How did you think the Mission to Mars was going to supply water to the crew? Certainly could not tanker enough fresh water to make the multi-year trip to Mars AND BACK.
Why, back in my day....
No. Nevermind. I'm not going to go there.
My blog
New and improved Tang better than prior Tang
Another innovation spin off from the space program.
"Here I'll put a blind fold on you and.. there you go, ok now drink this delicious fluid." "Hmmm its water, but it doesnt taste like tap water, it tastes filtered. Aquafina?" "No, pee" *PHHHttt*
Does it taste like Dutch lager?
"Why would I want to add pepper to my coffee?"
"Boy these experiments they gave us are pretty lame, I doubt scientists will learn anything... say... this coffee is really bad."
"Congratulations Mr. Simonyi, you are now our solar system's only known machine for turning yesterday's recycled coffee into code."
Tell that to the guy in this movie. The only time I watched it I was thinking that couldn't possibly work.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Or, maybe the one you know is an alternate sci-fi Universe...ever think about that? (Yes, as a matter of fact I AM trying to make his head explode. Should be hilarious)
My blog
Urine is water with stuff dissolved in it. Remove the solutes, and you get water again, which is all that this process is doing. There is nothing special about it, nature has been doing this for a long__________ time, as has the republic of Singapore
that thing better remove the caffine from yesterdays coffee or there are going to be a few problems with the astronauts.
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
[W]ith the space shuttles due to retire in two years, NASA needed to make sure the station crew would have a good supply of fresh water.
<rant>
Slightly off-topic, but retiring the shuttles is nonsense. Why can't NASA extend the life of the shuttle like it did for the mars rovers, since no replacement vehicle is available?
That would have saved $250M.
</rant>
If you want the cleanest water Singapore has to offer then heavily treated sewage is the way to go.
It's actually a brand-name drink.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWater
"This is our advanced technology unit" she said, lifting up a small backpack. "We've developed a miniaturized package for field parties; twenty pounds of equipment contains everything a man needs for two weeks:food, water, clothing, everything."
"Even water?" Elliot asked. Water was heavy: seven-tenths of human body weight was water, and most of the weight of food was water; that was why dehydrated food was so light.
But water was far more critical to human life than food. Men could survive for weeks without food, but they would die in a matter of hours without water. And water was heavy.
Ross smiled. "The average man consumes four to six liters a day, which is eight to thirteen pounds of weight. On a two-week expedition to a desert region, we'd have to provide two hundred pounds of water for each man. But we have a NASA water-recycling unit which purifies all excretions, including urine. It weighs six ounces. That's how we do it."
Seeing his expression, she said: "It's not bad at all. Our purified water is cleaner than what you get from the tap."
"I'll take your word for it."
Think about it. I'm sure they had to try a bunch of times to get it to pass the taste test. Who volunteered to test it? How much were they paid?
They couldn't hire winos since you could give them pure, unpurified urine and they'd say it was an excellent vintage.
-- Will program for bandwidth
If we're to survive as a species, in the long run, we have to get off this rock. Permanently. And unless we perfect some form of cryo-sleep or faster than light travel (possibly even if we DO perfect those), we're going to need some means of recycling our own waste products into usable substances.
I've been in situations where the only water available for drinking also happened to be the local wild animals' mudhole. Animal urine and fecal matter were most certainly present, but there was no other water for miles in any direction. So it was scooped up, run through a rag to skim off any solids, run through an activated charcoal filter to purify it, pumped full of iodine to kill any microbes that might have survived the charcoal filtration, then turned into koolaid to mask the taste. Survival situations will do wonders for changing what you are and are not willing to drink. I was fortunate that I had all that equipment for purification. Those living in third world nations don't have the option of stocking up at the local REI.
And I imagine space travelers heading for outer worlds, asteroid belts, or other star systems will have their options pretty limited as well :)
They should have included Zima and Baby Duck. The astronauts would have been begging for unprocessed urine as an alternative.
Time saved. Money saved. Mars, here we come!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
For cryin' out loud. The water that we all drink today, was waste from an untold number of lifeforms that have come before us. With this device, NASA is doing in a few hours or minutes what the Earth does in about ten-thousand years. The only thing repulsive about it is its 'immediacy'.
Sig this!
This has already been happening in different parts of Australia for years due to serious lack of water problem.
... just consider the fact that all the water on Earth has been through at least one animal at least one time. It's ALL urine.
You may squeam at will.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
...but your tap water is recycled urine too, it just happens to be a mostly natural process...
That headline is retarded. It was not "urine" which passed the test, anymore than it is sewage which you drink every day.
...too.. many... jokes... can't.. hold...on......
Hey Biff, You want to try my chocolate fudge cake?
Is NASA taking the piss?
well, you drink it as urine.
Contrary to what some of you might think when you drink tap water there is a very high likely hood it's been processed from the wastewater of others.
Unless you live at the top of water supply chain (the literal top of the mountain) another city used your water source and discharged it's sewage back into it before you got it. To put it bluntly, everyone is downstream and you are drinking the wastewater of the cities upstream from you.
Just because it flowed in a river or seeped into the ground and was pumped out doesn't change the fact that you are already drinking processed waste water. The best part is the guys in space are going to be drinking a known source. The stuff you drink has mine runoff, animal feces and industrial waste along with acid rain.
The astronauts water will be cleaner than the stuff you drink. Especially if you are stupid enough to drink water bottled water.
haiku
flask of ripe urine
pressed to dead bsd lips
bsd drink up
You can drink my bodily fluids anyday!
They recycle body waste on Arrakis too...
Liet-Kynes: Urine and Feces are processed in the thigh-pads.
No, I'm New Here
Boiling dirty water and recondensing the steam... Perfectly simple... What's the big deal?
you had me at #!
next up:
brownie recycler.
Awesome.
Let's see some of those starving masses make it to earth orbit and we'll talk.
Did this story pass?
I think I'll 'pass' a little, myself...
Degustibus nil et disputandum.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Naturally occurring water here on earth has dissolved minerals and other trace elements that are critical for our health. It is not advisable for people to drink only distilled water over any long term, without taking other precautions.
I suspect NASA has taken this into account, and do add additives to the water (iodine is mentioned for added sterility) but just FYI for wannabe distilled-piss drinkers out there.
Still, while I don't want to be supercritical I dew think the esteamed publication was just being condensending.
A quick google didn't turn up an authoritative source... However, Jerry Pournelle makes the claim that in the '70s the cleanest running stream in California was the output of the hyperion wastewater treatment plant. Which wasn't saying that the natural streams were necessarily horrible, but they do have natural pollutants (the bears gotta crap somewhere, right?), so the treated water is cleanest. Always sounded quite logical to me.
Malfunctions not withstanding, of course.
ehintz
... I always laugh at people who think "ewww yuck" at recycled water, if they knew the kinds of waste products from all the other organisms that exist in their drinking water, the lakes they swim in, etc, they would be just as disgusted. We already do technically eat the waste products of other animals and ourselves and have been doing so since forever, the fact that people are so distanced from nature I think add's a lot of distortion to their perception. Since once you become divorced from the cycles of nature, by being brought up in a modern society not having to deal with or observe such processes up close and personal as a part of ones daily living, you develop really fucked up views divorced from the processes of the world.
As the father post pointed out - it's basically a closed system. We've been breathing the same farts, drinking the same urine from the beginning - it's just that it's not so blatant as in the satellite.
..........FULL STOP.
Does anyone have calculations on what percentage of water hear on Earth has passed through the body of a human? What is the probability that any particular H2O molecule has passed through the body of a living organism as urine?
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
This tech has been around for some years.. the only thing is, it's not actually distilled water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newater
Whoever posts this rubbush is obviously to stupid to realise nobody reads past the title on these silly posts. Still its amusing to see how upset the poor widdle micro dick right wingers are about having a democrat president.
By the way the 1950's called and want their attitude back.
Troll boy you are just wasting your time.
Now go and get Mummy to tuck your 12 year old ass into bed, and leave the serious discussion to adults.
They studied three weeks to pass this urine test. [rimshot]
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I give the Russians a week before they realize this is a vodka distillation apparatus. Pee out the window guys, the system is tied up making us a batch of Stolychnia!
Congratulations! Hopefully, you have just ensured no Slashdot reader will ever buy from your site.
We need a mod level lower than -1, I am sick of spam postings here.
Could we not make a filter so when a long post, such as the usual obama one that seems to get dredged up all the time lately, simply do not get posted after the same post occours more than three times in a day?
I am all for freedom of speech, but this is simply repeat trolling of the same stuff.
Yeah, the 'Far Star' had water recycling in the 'Empire' series. I believe the quote to the horrified Pelorat was something like, 'we'd run out of water pretty quick if we didn't.'
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I seemed to recall hearing that they already did this a decade ago...
You just got troll'd!
At $125.000.00 USD per gallon to lift water to the space station I hope they recycle it!
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWater
... they still need to send some stuff up there to ensure that they get pure water, namely the iodine, which will take up a lot less space in a shuttle or an unmanned soyuz vehicle to keep water fresh.
Let's not forget that half of the water that's distilled will be used to give the crew oxygen too, so that might have positive returns on how many Lithium Oxide cells (do they still use those?)to change carbon dioxide into oxygen, so that's less of those shipped over.
Not only are we saving costs in materials (a tank full of iodine can last a long time), we're saving in space on those resupply runs to send more equipment for testing.
The thing that irks me is why vent the hydrogen out? Well, they should for now, but it would be put to better use having it supplement solar power.
It would give NASA an incentive to research and further develop what would be "fuel cell" technology and it would close the power loop as well as intertwine it with the water supply loop.
They could modify it from:
-100% water extracted from humidification.
-93% of water extracted from urine.
-50% of the purified water will be used for electrolysis to provide oxygen.
-Hydrogen is vented.
To the following:
-100% water extracted from humidification.
-93% of water extracted from urine.
+50% of water will be used for electrolysis
+15% of oxygen and hydrogen obtained from electrolysis will be used to provide supplimental power. (This might be used to make the entire loop cost nothing in power)
+The remaining oxygen will be used for breathing.
It's also possible to develop a module solely to create a hydrogen based generator. Then again, there are risks involved in that concept. Namely, the problem of space debris smacking it.
I guess it looks like they're in trouble now!
Wow, I would NOT want to be the guy who cleans out the bin of stuff left over after they distill all the water out of it...
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Anyone ever drink boiled water from a lake or river while camping? Where do you think the fish and other water & land animals go to the bathroom? Come on people - Get a grip!
Recycling waste water is common in the big cities of Southern Africa.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Just remember a truly great beverage shouldn't leave you with a foam moustache that can only be removed with turps.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
squeeze the urine out of the diapers!
Honestly, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but this was pretty damned blatant. Sorry for the lack of supporting linkage. I couldn't remember the system's acronym, and I was feeling a bit lazy.
Most people would initially have a natural aversion to drinking recycled urine-water but if you take all of the urine out and are left with nothing but H2O molecules then naturally all you would be drinking is pure water.
It shouldn't matter what the source was, H2O is H2O, not a water molecule with a pee molecule attached to it.
One of the effects of zero g is loss of taste. Astronauts have told me they like to put hot sauce on their food because it has little taste compared to the same food on earth.
...one cup.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
To all you americans ( Usa I mean, sorry Canada) this is your tax dollars being used wisely. This technology will become vital when drought caused by global warming becomes more frequent. Here in brisbane we are about to get recycled water as we have been in drought for 2 years. [brisbane dam levels] http://www.seqwater.com.au/content/standard.asp?name=DamOperationsAndMaintenance [recycle water project] http://www.westerncorridor.com.au/home.aspx?docID=1 Weird thing is brisbane for its population size has a massive dam - Wivenhoe Dam and were running out of water?
...urine no position to argue.
It's actually just supposed to be fucking hilarious, and it is. It's well-written, too.
Everyone who lives somewhere that gets its drinking water from a river which has another town upstream is already doing this. Just without the fancy steam step...
Everyone else does so on a longer timescale.
...those food replicators had to start with matter from SOMEWHERE.
This is dejavu all over again - Donovan had a song about this in 1973 called "the Intergalactic Laxative". Have a listen to it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u846w66zTQ
(it wasn't any better with the formatting, sorry)
Aren't you glad it isn't Micro$oft running the space program. They would recycle your piss in three flavours: Home, Enterprise and Ultimate the same way they do down here on earth with the rest of their shit.
If it was April I would say that NASA was trying to take the piss out of us
In the event of an emergency, which would you rather have -- your fiddly NASA-inspired technology or a 1 cent plastic jug filled with tap water and a piece of reflective metal to signal the search party? NASA will tell you to take the water and metal. No, seriously, they do desert survival exercises (as does the Army, the Boy Scouts, etc) and its always the same advice: if you have water, survival is a matter of sitting your butt down exactly where it is and waiting for rescue. All that requires is any reflective piece of metal -- shiny things in the desert are visible from the air all the way to the horizon.
The anti-pattern is thinking that your supplies make you invincible or well-prepared and then you go do something stupid like walk away from your last known location, to perish when you find that you were not nearly as well prepared as you thought you were.
Now what are you going to do with the 250 million I just saved you? Well, that would be enough to provide actual drinking water to every citizen of a midsized nation who doesn't have it. Desert optional.
Or I suppose you could have dreams of one day, in the far future, having something which kinda-sorta resembles something you read about in a science fiction novel.
Decisions, decisions.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
for ages
only difference is, that the nasa version produces its own artificial gravity through rotation and it should be a lot smaller and more efficient
why this took 250m$ is out of my reach, but recycling urine is really nothing new
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Am I the only one amazed that they weren't already doing this long ago?
After all, this has been bandied about for decades as an essential space technology. And it's not as if the required technology is rocket science exactly.
Next you're going to tell me that the space station doesn't have a rotating wheel to simulate artificial gravity...
In public toilets (in malls, cafes etc.), there are wastebaskets for used toilet paper. Some even have a sign inside that reads "Please do not flush toilet paper, use the bin provided. Thank you for your understanding!". Ostensibly, they want to prevent sewer clogging.
-1, Random Babbling?
Get your own free personal location tracker
You get water when it works, when it does not you get to find out if there is a diabetic among you in the old world of medicine way.
Singapore has been recycling waste water for the pass couple of years or so.
It is supposed to be so pure it can even be directly used for chip making purposes (distilled water?) I think.
I have yet to notice a problem with our water here.
Ok, so in order to boil water in space, u create a gravitational pull to keep the water down, and also pull the denser air down to make the steam rise. If they can pull the air, why cant they put this gravitational unit to use and pull all the green gases out of the atmosphere - filter out the bad stuff and save earth from the global warming?
After the water has been through the purification system, they add iodine. They don't need to, but the water is so pure it tastse weird, so iodine is added to make it more familiar.
... that the air you breathe or the water you drink or the food you eat hasn't already been through at least one set of lungs or digestive tract? The Last Breath of Caesar" calculation shows that every breath each of us takes likely contains 1 molecule of Caesar's Last Breath.
Similarly, every glass of water you drink has an average of 3.6x10^12 or 3.6 million million molecules of Titanic Water (water from the iceberg that sunk the Titanic).
From that link:
Their disclaimer is funny, too: "Special disclaimer: We do not advocate or condone the use of ICE in whisky, and it is merely used here for illustrative purposes. We also do not condone the sinking of ships, and acknowledge that the iceberg was not entirely to blame for the sinking of the Titanic."
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Well at least in your article from 2000 the system was under development, the 2005 article I quoted from Wired had Water Security (the company that commercialized the technology) toting the system around in a Toyota pickup and using it in a foot powered configuration and taking it to villages in Iraq that had no clean water.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/urine.html
So the system was viable in 2005, not just under development like it was in 2000. Its the years from 2005 to now that should concern you, though some of those years they weren't flying the shuttle. Who knows if this thing would fit on a Soyuz or Progress module.
Don't aspire to malice and all that
Obama is not going to hire Brownie.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There was certainly a lot of blogospheric noise about some British agency finding Prozac in drinking water. The only problem: it never happened. Someone hypothesised (wrongly) that this could happen, someone misquoted, and the nonsense took off from there. The actual agency which "found" the Prozac has never actually run such a test. Of course, only the sensational claim is remembered...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/aug/12/thisweekssciencequestions3
EAT SHIT!!11!!!1! LOLOLO ITZ NOT TROLL/OFFTOPIC/FLAMEBAIT EITHER LOLOLO
whispering now to appease the content filter
While the water is drinkable, the primary goal is to feed the water to the Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA) for electrolysis. The OGA needs to be functional in order to increase the crew size. Currently the OGA is only periodically turned on for testing and requires bags of water to be hooked up to it. The goal is to feed the water from the WCS to the OGA, allowing for the full time production of O2 needed to support a 6 man crew. Well, not full time, as it really only functions during daylight hours when it can feed off the soloar arrays.
The final missing piece is the sabatier system which will take scrubbed CO2 from the cabin and H from the OGA to produce water. The OGA currently just dumps the H overboard. All of this is to test how the entire process would work for a trip to Mars, with the goal of showing that >80% of the O2 needed for the trip can be gotten via this 3 stage cycle where the waste water from normal eating/drinking provides the initial water source for the OGA.
None of this is really about drinking the water. But it does make good headlines. Afterall, if you are brining up bags of water for the OGA, why wouldn't you just drink that water. The real reason the water is so pure is because the OGA unit is much more fickle about what it drinks than a person.
Now they just have to put this in a suit, and recapture all of the moisture, including sweat, humidity in breath, and etc..
Then we can live for years on a SPICE planet for days without water...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Many plants around the worlds do this with drinking water today.
You have urine, extract the H2O and you have water.
The only reason everyone doesn't so it is that the public is full if ignorant fucks in power.
The water being dumped into rivers after being treated in a plant is always cleaner then the river it's being dumped into.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not mailce, but more Occam's razor applied to bureaucracy. Any bureaucracy's primary mission appears to be "survival," so making the ISS self-sufficient lessens the need for Shuttle resupply missions, etc etc. Simply delaying the water recycling capability benefits both the bureaucracy as well as the supply contractors. There's strong pressure from that end to maintain the status quo. I don't think anyone involved with the ISS or Shuttle programs would advocate shifting the assembly sequence such that the politicians could step in and close the program early.
Eh, the engineer in me wanted the ISS to be an actual *useful* resource, and not some destination that simply justifies the existence of the Shuttle program. Hell, even without the recycling capability, just taking the main fuel tank all the way to orbit would have provided enough H2 and O2 to make tons of water - they don't run the tank dry, and the H2 is overloaded by 500kg to guarantee they don't run lean at MECO. Don't get me started on what a waste *that* is.
I would rather drink untreated urine then watch either again.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It is all relative to what you know.
If i break down the molecules that make up urine, i will find elements of all sorts, including h2o, which also usually iron, zinc etc...etc...
If we had an existing teleportation device like in star trek, which disassembled all the molecules into their respective kind, then you could reuse as much of each material to rebuild other parts.
I may be ahead of the times here, but I know its not too far out before we get teleportation technology working....maybe not to the same level as in ST but we already can teleport light.
Using the teleportation technology we woudl be able to do much....reassemble all the iron into an actual iron bearing.. or better yet all the h2o into you guessed it...drinkable water.
Funny when you are being scientific about your point of view, how little things like this can disgust you.
Wang-Tang. Just like momma used to make...
Cramped quarters, see the same three or four people months on end, drink not your own recycled urine, but your fellow astronauts, Bob's ... Where do I sign up!
MmmMmMmMmm Tranya
For billions of years water has run down rivers to the ocean and then evaporated into the air and rained down onto land and run back in the ocean in rivers. We all drink re-claimed sea water.
and now we know why!
You mean they sent $250M worth of sand up there?
All the water in the world is recycled at least once. Your pure bottled water, even those streams of pure mountain water are nothing more than recycled dinosaur piss. Think about it: the dinosaurs were around for over a hundred and sixty million years. There were billions of them alive at any one time, including the ones swimming in the oceans. Think that they couldn't have drunk all the water in the world and pissed it out at least once in that time? No? Think again.
This has been debated here in Australia in places where water is very scarce. One issue is with hormones and drugs which get into the urine and can find their way back into the food supply via a recycling system.
Yeah, I heard that the Aussies recycle their urine after a few tinnies in order to make more beer. They call it XXXX because they can't spell "piss" ;)
Everyone may think this is funny, but this kind of technology is going to be necessary for ANY kind of extended deep space mission (i.e. a trip to Mars).
Apparently NASA has yet to bow down to our new Asparagus overlords.
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- aqk
F U
My greatest shuttle waste story is from one of the MIT open courseware series. Aerospace students listening to lectures from NASA folks that worked on developing the shuttle.
Because of the shuttle takes off and lands with different amounts of weight in its cargo bay, they had to pad launch vehicle with lead in order to keep the center of gravity in the right place for reentry.
Supposedly this was a problem the Russians discovered building Buran as well.
So in addition to untold amounts of liquid H2, untold tons of lead have been sent up, and returned via the shuttle.
If you haven't listened to the series, I highly recommend it.