Space Shuttle Endeavor took off for the International Space
Station this past Saturday, to deliver a device capable of recycling urine
into water. The $250 million urine recycling system will use a process of distillation, filtration, ionization and oxidization to turn
"yesterday's coffee into today's coffee" as one NASA astronaut puts it.The recycling system will be tested in space and the water will be sampled by engineers back on Earth before being used by the astronauts on the space station. It's already been tested on Earth, and samplers couldn't taste any difference between tap water and the recycled urine water except for a slight taste of iodine which controls microbial growth.
Now I know why I didn't become an astronaut - oh, and then there was physics...
Photo: Space Station Toilet on Flickr from Richardefreedman under Creative Commons License
I wonder how many times that can be recycled? You would think that it could only be done so many times before a person would have problems.
Haha.. well, if the water comes out clean every time, it could be done forever.