ISS Gets New Recycling Gear, Ready For Larger Crew

TnGoastiiaiu submitted a space.com story that expands on coverage we've had earlier about improvements being made to the ISS to increase crew capacity. He writes "ISS gets new recycling gear that transforms human waste to drinking water. Some of the water will be used to get Oxygene, too. This way it will soon be possible to host more crew members. " Also, someone needs to smack the webmaster over there for putting a background texture behind the text. It's pretty unreadable along the left hand side of the screen.

Re:Waste hydrogen?

[mrvan]

Waste hydrogen? I would have expected them to have some use for that.

The obvious thing to do with hydrogen is to use it as fuel. But think about it: burning it would undo the electrolysis by consuming all the oxygen generated, so unless they are looking for a way to convert electricity into a chemical fuel, it isn't very useful...

if oxygen is scarcer than energy, burning stuff isn't a sensible thing to do

Re:I always thought...

[RetiredMidn]

IIRC, they now have enough docking ports to park a second Soyuz.

Re:Waste hydrogen?

[ivan256]

Generally, that hydrogen will require oxygen(e) to be useful, and they're splitting the oxygen off for other uses already.

Re:Water into code?

[csnydermvpsoft]

What if they have to maintain someone else's Perl?

Friends don't let friends code Perl, either.

Re:Waste hydrogen?

[sunking2]

Booked for ones of the last shuttle launches is the Sabatier unit. This takes CO2 from the scrubbers and H from the OGA and produces H2O and methane. The H2O is then fed back into the OGA, methane is dumped. Though not needed for the ISS to function, it's a testbed for a WPA -> OGA -> SAB process which through normal water intake by the astros would allow for >=80% of the oxygen needed for a Mars trip. Or so we hope. Until then the H is useless as just about anything you'd want it for requires O2 and it's rather dangerous to keep around. The OGA has been up there for a year or so. Every few months when a progress brings some bags of water we go through a week of activations. This was actually the big reason that they had to fix the solar arrays last year. The OGA needs a decent amount of power and typically runs only during day time. About 60 out of every 90 minutes.