Urine Passes NASA Taste Test

Ponca City, We love you writes "Astronauts flying aboard space shuttle Endeavour are delivering a device to the International Space Station that may leave you wondering if NASA is taking recycling too far. Among the ship's cargo is a water regeneration system that distills, filters, ionizes, and oxidizes wastewater — including urine — into fresh water for drinking or, as one astronaut puts it, 'will make yesterday's coffee into today's coffee.' The US space agency spent $250M for the water recycling equipment but with the space shuttles due to retire in two years, NASA needed to make sure the station crew would have a good supply of fresh water. The Environmental Control and Life Support Systems uses a purification process called vapor compression distillation: urine is boiled until the water in it turns to steam. In space, there's an additional challenge: steam doesn't rise, so the entire distillation system is spun to create artificial gravity to separate the steam from the brine. The water has been thoroughly tested on Earth, including blind taste tests that pitted recycled urine with similarly treated tap water. 'Some people may think it's downright disgusting, but if it's done correctly, you process water that's purer than what you drink here on Earth,' said Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper."

Neat

However, I don't think anybody wants to drink this warm, so better make that piss frosty.

Re:Neat

Some of us can't throw away $250M on something like this, we're forced to drink ours le naturale.

Re:Neat

Some of us can't throw away $250M on something like this, we're forced to drink ours le naturale.

Yeah, but here you pay a buck per can and call it "Budweiser".

Re:Neat

it's not just this site. the maturity level implied by the summary/article bodes poorly for the human race.

it's called the water cycle [wikipedia.org]. any water you consume, no matter where it's from, has been recycled through natural ecological/biochemical processes. in fact every molecule that makes up your body has been "recycled" in countless ways.

there's nothing gross or unsanitary about recycling the waster from urine through proper distillation. there is absolutely no difference between drinking water distilled from urine and water distilled from rain water or river water. that kind of irrational thinking is the reason why people will spend 10x the money to buy name brand drugs rather than the chemically & pharmacologically identical generics.

you should be more grossed out by keeping your toothbrush within 20 ft of your toilet (as most people seem to do) since studies have shown that fecal bacteria can be sprayed up to 20 ft from the toilet each time the toilet is flushed.

Re:Neat

Yeah, pretty disgusting. That's why I never flush my toilet.

No, I'm New Here

No, I'm New Here

Re:Tell that to the guy

Tell that to the guy in this movie

WTF? You should have linked to Dune, [imdb.com] not frigging Waterworld! Now go hand in your geek card.

More like "not far enough"

Oh yeah, funny, astronaut pee. But for crying out loud (and losing valuable water in the process), what is so hard to understand about a closed system?

"Going too far" is spending millions of dollars to send precious DHMO [dhmo.org] to the space station, when there are perfectly good pre-assembled dihydrogen monoxide molecules being blown out into the vacuum.

Childish

It's bad enough that the mainstream media has been acting like a bunch of prepubescent children over the urine recycling, but now Slashdot has to get into the game as well?

"that may leave you wondering if NASA is taking recycling too far"

Uh, nope, it doesn't leave me wondering that at all. In fact, when I first read about it I was rather surprised that the ISS wasn't recycling urine already. Any manned moon-base, or long-duration trip to reach Mars, would absolutely require the recycling of urine.

Re:Childish

People are too far from their food. If people are upset over urine, what would they think of all of the solid waste that ends up as fertilizer?

If you want to impress me

turn today's brownies into tomorrow's brownies

Re:If you want to impress me

McDonald's uses a similar process to create their hamburger patties.

disgusting?

Why is that so disgusting? All the water you drink was probably pee at some point anyway.

Recycling too far? Heck no

Although it makes for a nice Beeb quip, no, it is not too far. Sending water into low-Earth orbit is not cheap (a launch delta-V of ~ 9 km/s) , and sending it to other places like the Moon and Mars is even more expensive. That's why it is necessary to begin testing and using this technology, where it is possible to actually send replenishment water in case something doesn't work properly.

Taking recycling too far

I'd be worried if they were attempting this and they didn't take the recycling far enough.

closed eco-systems

Earth is also a closed ecosystem where we breath in the burnt remains of food ingested by our neighbors, where tap water is derived from the same lakes and streams that animals use as public toilets. Just because the filtration occurs further away and uses some natural bedrock, doesn't make it any different.

Once you have just steam, it can no longer be considered urine, so drinking water is made from condensed steam

I for one plan on no longer partaking in this twisted backwards environment. Long ago I employed the oil companies to convince the ignorant masses to emit large quantities of CO2 - in an elaborate plot to raise global temperatures and melt the pristine icecaps which I will then route into my drinking water. Furthermore, I will destroy this insane ecosystem that exists in this evil urine drinking manner. You may wonder why I am willing to so freely say this, but what can you do about it? What can you do! mu-hahaha.

anyone know what we were talking about?

Had a glass of water at Lake Tahoe CA?

The waste water treatment industry has 3 levels of treatment here on Earth. Primary was what was done in the 60's and before (if any treatment). Solids were ground and held to allow bacteria to digest it (the septic tank method) and it was dumped in the river to dilute it for downstream, with a shot of Chlorine. Then secondary treatment came online in the 70's and later, which is what most municipalities do today, where the solids are filtered out by vacuum or pressure filters and burned or buried, but you'd still be able to tell that the chlorine treated effluent was far from potable.

Finally there is tertiary treatment, which yields water so pure you could drink it (disgusting as it might seem), and this is what is implemented at locations such as Lake Tahoe CA. The water flowing out of the waste water treatment is cleaner than that in the lake itself, after the calcium filtration, etc. There are also de-nitrogenation and de-phosphoration processes to "scrub" the effluent of excess Nitrogen and Phosphorus.

How did you think the Mission to Mars was going to supply water to the crew? Certainly could not tanker enough fresh water to make the multi-year trip to Mars AND BACK.

blind taste tests?

"Here I'll put a blind fold on you and.. there you go, ok now drink this delicious fluid." "Hmmm its water, but it doesnt taste like tap water, it tastes filtered. Aquafina?" "No, pee" *PHHHttt*

Already featured in Crichton's "Congo" (1980)

"This is our advanced technology unit" she said, lifting up a small backpack. "We've developed a miniaturized package for field parties; twenty pounds of equipment contains everything a man needs for two weeks:food, water, clothing, everything."

"Even water?" Elliot asked. Water was heavy: seven-tenths of human body weight was water, and most of the weight of food was water; that was why dehydrated food was so light.
But water was far more critical to human life than food. Men could survive for weeks without food, but they would die in a matter of hours without water. And water was heavy.

Ross smiled. "The average man consumes four to six liters a day, which is eight to thirteen pounds of weight. On a two-week expedition to a desert region, we'd have to provide two hundred pounds of water for each man. But we have a NASA water-recycling unit which purifies all excretions, including urine. It weighs six ounces. That's how we do it."

Seeing his expression, she said: "It's not bad at all. Our purified water is cleaner than what you get from the tap."

"I'll take your word for it."

A very necessary step

If we're to survive as a species, in the long run, we have to get off this rock. Permanently. And unless we perfect some form of cryo-sleep or faster than light travel (possibly even if we DO perfect those), we're going to need some means of recycling our own waste products into usable substances.

I've been in situations where the only water available for drinking also happened to be the local wild animals' mudhole. Animal urine and fecal matter were most certainly present, but there was no other water for miles in any direction. So it was scooped up, run through a rag to skim off any solids, run through an activated charcoal filter to purify it, pumped full of iodine to kill any microbes that might have survived the charcoal filtration, then turned into koolaid to mask the taste. Survival situations will do wonders for changing what you are and are not willing to drink. I was fortunate that I had all that equipment for purification. Those living in third world nations don't have the option of stocking up at the local REI.

And I imagine space travelers heading for outer worlds, asteroid belts, or other star systems will have their options pretty limited as well :)

Re:And for this bright idea...

No, they paid two hundred and fifty million dollars to get it to work. In space. Without taking up to much space or energy in the space station. (Where both are at a premium.)

And this is essential technology if we are ever going to leave the Earth-Moon system. Shipping enough water for a manned trip to even the nearest planet is simply prohibitive, in weight, volume, and cost. So long-term it's a good investment. (If you think we should invest in space at all, of course...)

Re:And for this bright idea...

These are a good investment even without interplanetary missions. One of the features of Frank Herbert's novel Dune [amazon.com] that I always thought fascinating was the stillsuit, where a person's waste water, whether urine, tears, or sweat, could be recycled with extreme efficiency. If you work in the desert, wouldn't it be nice to have one of these for emergencies?

Re:HOWEVER

From your high userid I can identify you as a noob. For future reference, these types of comments are best posted ANONYMOUSLY. God help you if anyone knows your real name. I foresee a future employer doing a google search on your various aliases and THAT comment turning up.

Re:Yeah, well

How do you know it wasn't actually Budweiser?

Because he only puked for an hour!
 

Re:Woo!

Actually, the home version is a few miles down the road, typically.