On tap in space: Urine will not go to waste

[flashl]

WASHINGTON — Astronauts living on the International Space Station soon will take recycling to new extremes: They'll get some of their drinking water from the toilet.

NASA has spent decades perfecting a system to transform urine into water that can be used in space for drinking, food preparation and washing. Agency officials say the water from the system will be cleaner than U.S. tap water.

The new $250 million machine was being unpacked Wednesday at the space shuttle's Florida launch site. Shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to take it to the station this fall. If all goes well, the so-called toilet-to-tap system will be fully operational in six months.

Russia developed a similar system in the 1980s but it never flew in space because of concerns over crew squeamishness, says former station astronaut Leroy Chiao, now a space consultant. He says station crews expect hardships and aren't likely to object.

USA Today

[BR_Parkway]

1. How could something like that possibly cost/be worth $250 million??

[flashl]

2. Perhaps same accounting or contracts that provides us with $2,000 toliet seats? nt

[caraher]

3. It's not as easy as it sounds...

Creating a reliable toilet for freefall proved a surprisingly tough technological challenge in developing the Space Shuttle...

Stil, a quarter billion?

[drm604]

5. Most likely the actual hardware doesn't cost that much.

Most of that cost is probably R&D. It's possible that the results of this research may be useful here on earth for water purification systems or maybe even home recycling systems.

[htuttle]

6. It cost at least that much just to design the help screens

[eppur_se_muova]

4. I wouldn't call this a *complete* waste ... I mean there is the aesthetic factor ...

"After breakfast, I hook a full urine bag to the overboard dump valve and am rewarded with the usual snowstorm of escaping white particles. The constellation 'Urion,' as Wally Schirra has dubbed it, is formed by the instantaneous freezing of the urine stream as it reaches the vacuum of space and breaks into thousands of individual miniature spheres. Cascading out in an irregular stream, they whiz past the window and tumble off into infinity, glistening virginal white in the sunlight instead of the nasty yellow we know them to be. The fairytale quality is typical of this place, an unreal world far above the unseen squalor below."
Michael Collins, "Carrying the Fire," p. 246

[Vincardog]

7. This is not a new concept. Mot when you consider that 90% of the waste water in our cities

goes into the fresh water input.
Next time you are in any US city get a glass of tap water,
hold it up to the light,
see that stuff swirling around?
That is TP.