NYT writer drinks NASA water distilled from the finest astronaut pee and sweat.
Oh, what won't intrepid NYT reporter John Schwartz do for space journalism! Snip:
There are many elements of [NASA's current Space Shuttle Endeavor] mission, which is devoted to further construction of the station and improvements that will allow the station to double its crew size from three to six next year. But the gizmo that is getting the most attention is the “water recovery system,” which will recycle the station’s water supply. That’s right: urine, sweat in the air, waste water and other forms of moisture will be fed into the system, distilled and sent back to the tap.You'll have to read the whole piece to learn how the stuff tastes.The system, created at a cost of about $250 million, will recycle about 93 percent of the water used aboard the station. The cost of lifting supplies up to orbit is so high, though, that NASA estimates the system could pay for itself in as little as two years. Similar systems would be essential to maintaining long-term bases on faraway outposts on the Moon and Mars.
The astronauts don’t have a problem with this system. As Sandra H. Magnus, one of the astronauts who will be among the first to drink water produced by the new system aboard the station, noted in a recent interview, our earthbound water has been endlessly filtered through bodies, evaporated and rained down again. “We drink recycled water every day,” she said, “on a little bit longer time scale.”
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I'm actually surprised this isn't being done already, even on the shuttle. One would think when you're in a generally isolated environment with limited access to fresh resources, you'd look to recycle and reuse whatever you can.
Now, where's the matter proecessors to turn ALL waste into delicious meals from a replicator?
I don't understand what the big deal is. Distilled water is cleaner than what comes out of your tap, even if the source is urine.
I agree with 1 & 2. If we did this already, we'd also reduce the amount of nutrients, chloride and other additives we add to our oceans, rivers and streams. As it is, we treat waste water, dump it into the river in an "almost pure" condition, and collect it again (often a mile or so downstream) to purify into drinking water. Why not cut out the middle man?
I have toured a waste water treatment plant where, at the end of the tour, the tour guide drank the water that was being dumped into the system. It is very safe. And that tour guide did it only for the benefit of our small tour group -- there was no big splash about it in national press. :-)
It stands to reason all the water on the planet has passed through something's body in all its billions of years of existence.
Though as Braniac presenter John Tickle found out, pee needs to be very well filtered, to have a bit less 'nose'
NSFW?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=d9703_XzI5s
When your septic field is too close to your well it's often called 'drinking your own tea'.
250 million sounds like a bargain for developing this thing. They ought to spend another 250 seeing how small they can make it. Then I'm sure there are a bunch of villages that could really use something like this.
Awesome.
Now we just need to finish up working on that foldspace technology, and figure out a way to deal with the giant sandworms so we can control the spice production.
So, who will be the first company to exploit this commercially on a larger scale?
I´m thinking blinged out, hand made glass bottles containing the purified, destilled urine of various A-list actors, musicians and other assorted celebrities, with their respective portrait on the label and selling at 10-20 $ per half litre...
I'd like to think that it's just the press making a big deal over nothing, but I spent enough time working in water quality to know that people really freak out about 'toilet to tap' type recycling programs.
I think people can be made to understand on an intellectual level that H2O is H2O, and it's either got unacceptable contaminants in it or it doesn't, but it seems like people want to assign some sort of mystical contamination to those molecules if they were ever part of human waste.
Ah, here we go - right there in the first paragraph of Wikipedia's article on 'Magical thinking' is a link to the 'law of contagion'. That's exactly what I'm talking about - an illogical belief that something continues to be influenced by something it was once in contact with.
And of course, I'm sure a certain amount of it IS stupid media sensationalism. How many times did we hear about the fact that Lisa Nowak wore an adult diaper when she made her cross-country drive? Never mind that it's pretty standard stuff for pilots and astronauts (she was both), not to mention millions of elderly people everywhere. It was a completely practical detail that was made into a big deal by the media.
The Fremen have been doing this for years. How else would you survive on DUNE without a stillsuit?
@ #6
I'm sure a big portion of that first 250 was spent making it small enough to fit on the space station, which should be plenty small enough to fit in a village =)
I'm like Astin; I just assumed they were already doing this, especially on the station. To me, the news is they weren't doing this before.
I'm surprised this is news. I worked on the space station program from 1989-93, participated in the early "piss drive" (got bitched at by my boss for posting a yellow tinged parody of the United Way fund drive thermometer, for some reason...), and designed a simulator to test the atmospheric portion of this system. They weren't drinking it at the point I left, but they weren't far off.
It's not distilled, by the way, no matter what the reporter says. I don't recall the entire process, since I wasn't directly involved in that design, but I know it did not include distillation. They were purifying it to >10MOhm and then putting minerals back in to make it drinkable.
Oh my, those poor astronauts. Didn't NASA realize the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide before they sent this system to them?!
I'd drink it if they added vinegar to the input.
HAHA u drinked a Pee.
@13
watch the video link I posted it explains, in theory how it works, reverse osmosis.
Singapore coincidentally recently unveiled the biggest reverse osmosis water filtration plant in the world, I believe to augment it's supply of fresh water
Meanwhile, the Chinese space administration issued a press release claiming to have achieved the same results with your Coke.
man I wondered where I put it down, curse those pesky Chinese
Ummm, John may have wanted to read this first. Not all NASA systems are always under benevolent NASA control at all times apparently. http://tinyurl.com/5ko28g.
250 Million Dollars? In Waterworld, Kevin Costner made his filtration system out of some old clothing and plastic tubes; fail on NASA's part, haha. I'm calling it now, every 5 star restaurant in America will have a bottle of this pee-water on their mineral water menu within the next year, it'll happen.
I've tied the NASA recycled drinking water. It tastes like Tang only saltier.