Space is tragically a forgotten frontier. No one cares about it anymore, even though it’s one of the few issues that unite us as a society. We did so during the Space Race, and everyone wanted to catch the solar eclipse in 2017. When it comes to exploration, especially the infinite realm of space, we as a country get behind it. At least, that’s what I hope, though we no longer have any ambitious plans for space. We’ve been to the Moon. The Russians got to Venus. Sadly, when you see NASA mentioned in the news, it’s usually about one of their disasters. The now-defunct Challenger and Columbia Shuttle programs are the most prominent and tragic.
But we could be going back to the Moon, which means the deployments into space could have a longer duration. At the International Space Station, they’ve developed a way for an astronaut to extend his or her water supply and reduce the number of resupply missions: drink your own urine. Yeah, not to get dark here, but I’d rather burn up on re-entry (via ABC News):
The federal agency announced astronauts aboard the International Space Station have been able to recover 98% of the water that crews take into space with them by recycling everything from urine to sweat.
As NASA prepares for longer missions -- including to the moon and potentially beyond -- engineers have been working on how to make sure astronauts have basic needs met without resupply missions, including how to recycle food, air and water.
This also helps ensure each crew member has an average of one gallon of water they need per day to drink, use in food preparation and for hygienic purposes, including brushing teeth.
"This is a very important step forward in the evolution of life support systems," said Christopher Brown, a member of the team at Johnson Space Center that manages the space station's life support system. "Let's say you collect 100 pounds of water on the station. You lose two pounds of that and the other 98% just keeps going around and around. Keeping that running is a pretty awesome achievement."
[…]
The collected water is put through a filter to break down any remaining contaminations. Sensors pick up any impurities and water deemed unacceptable for drinking is reprocessed, according to NASA.
Iodine is also added to the water that the sensors deemed acceptable to prevent microbial growth. It is then stored until it comes time for the crew to use it.
Jill Williamson, one of the managers behind this nasty process, is quoted in the piece saying, "The crew is not drinking urine; they are drinking water that has been reclaimed, filtered and cleaned such that it is cleaner than what we drink here on Earth.”
It’s still piss. You can’t polish a turd here, lady. No matter how you cut this, it’s the liquid from someone’s piss, and that’s what you’re drinking. Extracting this, that, and the other and pouring iodine in the solution doesn’t negate the fact that it’s urine. I can’t help but think that most will imagine Kevin Costner’s character in Waterworld, who also developed a way to drink his own urine:
I'll just stick to Poland Spring.
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