….Heck, you know the rest. It seems that the Space Shuttle Endeavour has some new plumbing to deliver to the International Space Station. A new water recycling system that can turn “yesterday’s coffee into today’s coffee”. Yep, they going to recycle urine.
According to a BBC News story Friday, the crew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, which is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday afternoon, will be handing off to their Space Station colleagues a water regeneration system designed to, among other things, recycle urine for reuse as fresh water.
The system, which will ionize, filter, distill, and oxidize wastewater, “will make yesterday’s coffee into today’s coffee,” one astronaut told the BBC.
The idea behind the $250 million system seems to have been to figure out a way to ensure that residents of the Space Station had a supply of fresh water. To date, the Space Station has had the luxury of getting water deliveries from newly arrived Space Shuttles. But the Shuttle program is slated for retirement after 2010, and that looks to end the program’s role as, among other things, the Space Station’s personal water truck.
Now, let’s face it, there is a bit of unreality that resides around the concept of “pure” water here on earth. That clean mountain stream contains runoff from all sorts of things, not to mention the fact that if there are fish in the water, there are various and sundry bits of biological flotsam. Delicacy prohibits our discussing that, however. Besides, W. C. Fields is supposed to have put it rather succinctly.
Science fiction fans have long been exposed to the concept of closed-system recycling, so this is no surprise to them. From a purely practical standpoint, this needs to be used for any real long distance space travel.
So, in the end, astronauts will have to boldly go if they want to boldly go.
Endeavour is set to launch in just over two hours from this writing. I was in Orlando with my family a number of years ago when a night launch took place. It was awesome, even from that far away. I envy the folks down there right now.
Godspeed, Endeavour.
All that gee whiz science stuff is over my head.
That’s why you never drink downstream from the herd.
Quilly, it doesn’t really matter. You are always downstream from something or someone you’d rather not be reminded about.
As for boldly going – only until we boldly STOP going when the shuttle is retired with nothing to replace it but last century’s space capsules. As a nation we are slowly retiring from space which keans we’ll be leaving it to other countries, such as China, who are in the infancies of their space programs and apparently have the will to explore that we seem to lack. Does it sound like I’m disappointed in my country and our vision of the future? In this area you would be right to assume so.
martian, we are slowly retiring from greatness.