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Astronauts Struggling with Urine-to-Water Machine

By: wikiboy send a private message
Washington : DC : USA | about 1 year ago  
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  • Astronauts
    Astronauts
    Posted by: wikiboy
    Trying to get drinking water
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Astronauts

If the International Space Station is ever going to be able to upgrade its on-board crew from 6 to 12, it is going to have to get the contraption that converts urine and sweat into drinkable water to function properly. But the machine just won't cooperate rarely able to work for two hours at a time without breaking down.

You would think a machine costing $154 million of taxpayer money but work more reliably. One of the latest attempts to get it to work has been to remove rubber supports and bolt the centrifuge into place hoping that it won't vibrate so much anymore. This has raised the functioning time to over 3 hours but it needs to exceed 4 hours to be acceptable.

As a last resort, the machine could be transported back to earth for repairs. It would be a blow to the space station's expansion plans in the near future.

The hope was that this machine would allow 70% of the drinking water to come from condensation and 30% from urine. But right now it is only able to contribute 10% from urine.

Just goes to show the difficulty of simulating space experiments on earth. You can invest millions and years in developing state of the art machinery, but once it fails in space there's often little you can do without sending it back to Earth. Makes me appreciate how Tom Hanks handled the problems aboard Apollo 13 with ground support all the more.

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Reported by wikiboy
wikiboy

Member Since Jul 19, 2008

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