We’re always interested in how astronauts “take care of business” in
the weightlessness of space. Now that the International Space Station
is up and running, we figured that it’s time to revisit the subject.
As we told you on page 25, millionaire American businessman Dennis Tito made history in April 2001 when he bought his way onto the International Space Station, also known as Space Station Alpha, by paying the Russian Space Agency a cool $20 million for the privilege of becoming the world’s first space tourist.
Since then, NASA has agreed to allow more such trips. So in case you’re planning to take a Space Station vacation, you might like to know what to expect if you get up there and have to… use the facilities.
The toilet on Space Station Alpha has a toilet seat and a bowl, but that’s where any similarity to Earth toilets ends. Since there’s no gravity in the space station, they can’t use water to flush the toilet—there’s no way to keep it in the bowl. The toilet flushes with “air currents.” What does that mean? That’s NASA’s polite way of saying that you’re pooping into a toilet bowl hooked up to a vacuum cleaner.
As for peeing, there’s a special vacuum hose in the bathroom designed for that purpose. Everyone has to use the same hose, but each astronaut is issued their own custom-fitted “personal urine funnel” (yes, the male funnels are shaped differently from the female funnels). These special attachments help to prevent leakage into the Space Station’s atmosphere and also helps to minimize the “yuck” factor associated with everyone having to pee into the same hose.
What happens next? Unlike the Space Shuttle, where the urine is collected into a storage tank and periodically vented into outer space, Space Station Alpha doesn’t have that luxury. The Space Shuttle makes short trips and returns to Earth on a regular basis, so its water tanks are refilled before each new mission. But Space Station Alpha (hopefully) is never coming back down, and the astronauts who live and work there will be in space for weeks or even months on end. Sending up fresh supplies of water every couple of months would cost a fortune, so NASA developed a different strategy: the station is designed to recycle every single drop of water possible, including sweat, including the moisture the astronauts exhale when they breathe, and their urine.
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The Space Station toilet pumps the astro-urine into a machine called a Urine Processor, or UP (pronounced “you pee”) for short. It works kind of like the spin cycle on a washing machine: the urine enters a cylindrical drum that rotates more than 300 times a minute; this causes the liquid to spread out in a thin layer across the surface of the drum. Most of the air has already been sucked out of the drum, creating a low-pressure environment that allows the water in the urine to boil off into steam at close to room temperature. The steam is then condensed back into liquid form. Everything else in the pee—minerals and salts—is collected in a filter, and the filters are changed at least once a month.
After the UP is finished, the “water” is pumped into a “Potable Water Processor,” where it is mixed with all the other reclaimed water in the Space Station: shower water, water used when the astronauts wash their hands or brush their teeth, and moisture that’s removed from the air by dehumidifiers. This waste water is pumped through a filter that removes any particles or debris. Then it’s pumped through several other filters to remove any chemicals, and finally it’s oxidized, or treated with oxygen, to remove any remaining chemicals and kill off any living organisms.
End result: Purified, drinkable water that is actually much cleaner than the water that comes out of your faucet at home. Really. It has almost no taste, because the water doesn’t contain any dissolved minerals like tap water does on Earth. There’s no smell, either. “That’s easy to get rid of,” says Alan Mortimer, head of Space Life Sciences at the Canadian Space Agency. “The things that smell are easy to take out.”
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In all, the system is able to recycle about 95% of the space station’s water. But what about the “solids”? The poop that’s collected in Space Bathroom Alpha can’t be recycled. Instead, it will be stored in sealed “toilet canisters” until one of the unmanned Russian Progress supply ships docks at the Space Station. After the fresh supplies are unloaded, the Progress is filled with the poop cans (and other garbage) and then jettisoned away from the station. Gravity pulls it back into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it burns up on reentry.
These flaming fireballs of space poop are a huge improvement over the original Space Shuttle toilets. Those toilets had a 14-day holding capacity and could not be emptied during a mission. As soon as they filled up, the astronauts had to either return to Earth…or improvise. And even back on Earth, the toilets were not easily emptied. They had to be removed from the shuttle and flown to Houston to be cleaned by highly trained technicians.
The International Space Station also has a shower, something the shuttle astronauts had to do without. (They had to make do with sponge baths and shampoo, originally designed for hospital patients, that didn’t need to be rinsed out.)
Taking a shower in space is similar to taking one on Earth, except that in the absence of gravity, the water doesn’t fall to the floor. It just floats around inside the shower stall, which is sealed to prevent the water from escaping into the rest of the Space Station. One advantage: Since the water floats around instead of going down the drain, you don’t need as much to take your shower as you would on Earth. You only use about a gallon of water, and instead of moving in and out from under the shower-head, you just grab the floating globs of water and rub them on yourself. When you’re finished, there’s a vacuum hose attached to one wall that you use to suck up all the drops before leaving the shower.
According to surveys, 57% of Americans shower daily, 17% sing in the shower, 4% shower with the lights off, and 3% clean their pets by showering with them.
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