Wired has a great article on NASA’s attempts to recycle urine into drinking water. Excellent read!
Over the past five years, the agency has spent $60 million delivering potable water to the International Space Station on the space shuttle (6 tons at a cost of about $40,000 per gallon).
One gallon of that stuff would dramatically improve my family’s quality of living. Two gallon’s and we’d have a whole new life!
Alan Shepherd’s first 15-minute suborbital flight was so short that no one thought to install a urine receptacle in his space suit. At T-minus 15 minutes, an electrical problem caused an 86-minute delay on the launchpad. Shepherd’s bladder soon reached the bursting point, and he radioed the first-ever “Houston, we have a problem” message. After some deliberation, mission control had an answer: “Do it in the suit.”