NASA Needs Your Urine

NASA is at it again. This time their number one priority is collecting all the urine they can find, from anyone. NASA engineers are in the process of designing the Orion space capsule, which is one of the vehicles that will eventually take astronauts to the moon and be in space for a much longer time than any previous NASA missions, orbiting unoccupied in space for up to six months.

What is the big deal you ask? Getting rid of all the stored urine. According to NASA, urine is full of solids which clog up the urine venting system over a period of time. During a mission, the Orion capsule will be expected to process 30 liters a day, which translates into nearly 8 gallons of straight up urine. There is no such thing as "simulated urine" and there is only one way to get it, from the tap.

I hope they can get the toilet issue resolved so no other problems come up like the recent toilet issues on the ISS.

Below is what the memo actually said:

Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 3:00 PM
Subject: Urine Collection Study Donor Request
Who: All Houston-SLS Associates, employees at 2200 Space Park, and any visitors to the building
What: Please donate your urine to our study
When: Monday, July 21 - Thursday, July 31 from 6 a.m. until goal amount is collected each day including weekends

The Orion Program will be holding a urine collection study starting Monday, July 21 and running through Thursday, July 31, 2008. We are looking for
donors as we need to collect a large amount of urine per day for the entire
11 day period. [...]

We will be hosting an informational meeting with encouraged attendance for
potential urine donors from 11-11:30 a.m. Thursday, July 17, 2008 in the
first floor conference room. In this meeting we will go over instructions
and guidelines for the study and introduce volunteers to the equipment that
will be used in the study. [...]

Please see the attached Donor Guide for further information on donating.

(NASA Watch)

Home to PointNiner

Astronauts Got No Place to Pee

I refuse to drop the familiar phrase when NASA runs into an orbital snafu, but there is a problem on board the International Space Station ("ISS").

A plugged toilet is the current issue plaguing the ISS inhabitants. Yes, the only toilet on board the ISS, aside from the one inside the Soyuz escape module (which only has 3 days of waste capacity with a full three-person ISS crew). The ISS needs spare parts pronto, luckily, if they can determine the root of the stoppage, NASA could get parts loaded onto Discovery which is currently sitting at the launch pad.

As you may have guessed, these toilets aren't found at Home Depot, they are high-tech toilets of the space world with zero grav. The toilets are driven by air flow (vacuum) to transport the poo away from a crew member's body into a sanitary storage receptacle. Back in the Apollo days, there wasn't even the vacuum driven toilets, rather they used bags with sticky openings to seal the poo inside. Believe it or not, history has been saving the current ISS crew as they have dipped into their emergency supply of Apollo era ziplock bags.

There seems to be an intermittent problem with air/water separator...a fabrication flaw of the toilet's original compressor unit (and a backup unit!). The toilet has been returned to service several times over the past several days only to be then taken back out of service shortly after NASA or the Russians thought they had 'er working. One (yes, anonymous) source in Houston said that the hardware used there for crew training may be flown to Florida for launch aboard Discovery, even though it too is expected to fail quickly after installation. A new toilet device, developed to accommodate a six person crew as opposed to the current three, was already planned for delivery later in 2008. It apparently can't come soon enough as NASA is expecting to rely on the ever-faulting current toilet compressor and the Apollo poo bags until that time.

This may not seem to be an Apollo 13-esque emergency, however, no doubt NASA and the Russians will contrive some goofy fix all held together with duct tape.

Home to PointNiner