Part of the urine collection system
Luka Bielski
Astronauts on spacewalks may soon be able to drink their own urine, thanks to a water filtration and recycling system that could be ready in time for NASA’s upcoming manned missions to the moon.
Urine and sweat wastewater is already recycled on the International Space Station, but the bulky equipment required to do so doesn’t fit in a space suit. NASA’s current solution is the Maximum Absorbency Garment, which, despite its technical name, is essentially just an adult diaper for collecting urine and feces. At the end of the spacewalk, these diapers are sent to the ISS’s waste system and eventually burned in Earth’s atmosphere, a frustrating waste of resources.
Chris Mason A researcher from Cornell University in New York says that current solutions are sufficient for spacewalks, which often last only a few hours, but that increased activity in space will require better solutions. He and his colleagues have developed a shoebox-sized, 8-kilogram device that can recycle urine collected through a unisex external catheter through a two-stage osmotic membrane filter with 87 percent efficiency.
The purified water is ready to drink and can be piped to a bag inside the spacesuit, which has the added benefit of ensuring a steady supply of drinking water. Current NASA spacesuits provide just under a liter of drinking water, which is often insufficient for long spacewalks. The remaining 13 percent of water cannot be extracted and remains in the filter.
“I thought this had already been done, but it hasn’t,” Mason said. “People who push the boundaries of humanity often trade discomfort for the opportunity to explore entirely new areas of science and medicine.”
The filtration technology is the same as that already used on the ISS. But unlike the ISS’s wastewater, urine does not contain soap or chemicals, so it is easier to extract water from it, the team said. Extracting water from feces is not yet “fully solved,” but Mason says this is not too much of a constraint, since astronauts often insist on just holding in their bowels during spacewalks.
While many of NASA’s current spacesuits have worked so far, change is needed because future astronauts will likely be more diverse in body shapes and sizes than their predecessors, he said. “The democratization of space brings new opportunities, but it also creates new challenges that we must address.”
Currently, the device is a prototype that is only being tested in a lab, but human trials involving collecting urine, recycling it, and drinking the water are expected to begin by November.
The researchers say the device could be incorporated into new versions of spacesuits planned for NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions to the moon. NASA has contracted with the private company Axiom Space to build the new suits, but the company declined to comment on the matter. New ScientistWhen asked how the spacecraft would deal with human waste, NASA declined to comment.
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