"The limiting factor in urine distillation is actually the high level of calcium
from disintegrating astronaut bone, a nice example of how problems in space find
ways to compound one another."
Sobering. One of the many long term effects of life away from Earth.[1]
With humanity's future probably (?) driving more of us to leave the planet, I'm glad these things are being studied. Where there's a will, there's a way.
They need to come up with either spinning ships or suits that compress you enough to activate the bones (they are piezoelectric so they naturally catch calcium ions when under stress).
They mention a botched drug study but I'm curious why that wasn't redone correctly given how many years we've been at this. And growing plants for that matter. Hop to it guys, we have to get this figured out while we have a station.
A note on their section on fire extinguishing - just about all aerospace fire extinguishing systems use agents with a fluorine based chemistry. Putting out a fire dissociates some of the agent, and in the presence of humidified air it recombines and forms hydroflouric acid, which will eat you from the inside out. So your air scrubbers had best do a good job at removing acid gasses.
It doesn't really eat you though: HF is so small that the problem is it just traverses straight through the skin into your blood and causes fluoridosis.
There's been more then a few metallurgy lab deaths because someone spilled a substantial amount of HF on themselves and didn't realize it.
This is a great read and unironically I want to subscribe to the substack, which is titled "Mars for the Rest of Us." The author is that Ceglowski of Pinboard and occasional space essays at idlewords.com, both of which make this self-recommending for me at least.
It's a cliche that space exploration creates discoveries that improve life back here on Earth. In the topics discussed in this essay, water reclamation and waste recycling especially, the future solutions developed I think will lead to improvements for terrestrial living.
The most interesting thing I learned is that we let people who need Zoloft on the ISS. The FAA will disqualify you for that unless you jump through hoops.
Curious that both average inputs and outputs match to exactly 5.74 kg. I had intuitively assumed there would be a significant difference, but I suppose that even if a lot of energy is extracted, the mass difference will be negligible, mc2 and all.
I'm also surprised that the vast majority of the output carbon is in the form of CO2 rather than feces.
It's all rather obvious in retrospect, it was just nice to see crystallized like this.
> I'm also surprised that the vast majority of the output carbon is in the form of CO2 rather than feces.
Not sure if you know, but in the same vein, I was shocked when I learned ~50% of the biomass of trees is carbon (right, we knew that), but also that the carbon came from CO2 the tree respirated. Also makes total sense in hindsight, but still think it's so cool.
The trees literally build their mass from the air and sunlight (and yes, obviously also water and trace minerals from the roots).
> On the Mir space station, this used to happen organically. Collecting water was a grubby job that involved chasing beach-ball sized spheres of condensate around the colder parts of the spacecraft with trash bags before they could climb into the walls and cause mayhem. Crew members spent three to four hours a day on this dirty and difficult task.
That sounds, frankly, horrible.
It made me think that the average space module probably smells like moist, reheated ass, too.
Yep! There was a submariner-turned-astronaut that mentioned the smell was pretty similar, and also that submarine deployments can be described as "breathing recycled farts for six months." At least submarines have replacement oxygen handy!
A lot of problems mentioned in the article are solvable by adding more mass - for supplies and spare parts. New generation reusable rockets can allow this. In the past it was costly to launch a rocket, so systems were designed to be compact, but complex/fragile. Cheap space access changes this equation.
Haven't many of the non-zero-g challenges been at least partly solved on nuclear submarines, that carry large crews and stay submerged for months at time? Of course there are more challenges, but you do have people living in a pressure canister for long periods.
I think the difference is largely due to the fact that bringing a bit of extra weight isn't as problematic in a submarine as it is in a spacecraft. For example, you always have a water source that can give you oxygen and you don't have to worry about discarding the byproducts.
With humanity's future probably (?) driving more of us to leave the planet, I'm glad these things are being studied. Where there's a will, there's a way.
[1] "Long-term space missions’ effects on the human organism: what we do know and what requires further research" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10896920
They need to come up with either spinning ships or suits that compress you enough to activate the bones (they are piezoelectric so they naturally catch calcium ions when under stress).
> With humanity's future probably (?) driving more of us to leave the planet, I'm
I'm seeing it's becoming ever-clearer that our best and possibly only real "option" is here on Earth. That means not fixing our mess = no future.
They mention a botched drug study but I'm curious why that wasn't redone correctly given how many years we've been at this. And growing plants for that matter. Hop to it guys, we have to get this figured out while we have a station.
A note on their section on fire extinguishing - just about all aerospace fire extinguishing systems use agents with a fluorine based chemistry. Putting out a fire dissociates some of the agent, and in the presence of humidified air it recombines and forms hydroflouric acid, which will eat you from the inside out. So your air scrubbers had best do a good job at removing acid gasses.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280646417_Acid_gas_...
It doesn't really eat you though: HF is so small that the problem is it just traverses straight through the skin into your blood and causes fluoridosis.
There's been more then a few metallurgy lab deaths because someone spilled a substantial amount of HF on themselves and didn't realize it.
This is a great read and unironically I want to subscribe to the substack, which is titled "Mars for the Rest of Us." The author is that Ceglowski of Pinboard and occasional space essays at idlewords.com, both of which make this self-recommending for me at least.
It's a cliche that space exploration creates discoveries that improve life back here on Earth. In the topics discussed in this essay, water reclamation and waste recycling especially, the future solutions developed I think will lead to improvements for terrestrial living.
The most interesting thing I learned is that we let people who need Zoloft on the ISS. The FAA will disqualify you for that unless you jump through hoops.
My guess is they stock it in case someone needs it during the mission. Not that they are sending people who are already taking it.
If somebody needed it during a mission it would take at least 2 weeks to take effect. Those drugs are not usually prescribed for acute mental issues.
People typically stay on the ISS for six months.
Curious that both average inputs and outputs match to exactly 5.74 kg. I had intuitively assumed there would be a significant difference, but I suppose that even if a lot of energy is extracted, the mass difference will be negligible, mc2 and all.
I'm also surprised that the vast majority of the output carbon is in the form of CO2 rather than feces.
It's all rather obvious in retrospect, it was just nice to see crystallized like this.
> I'm also surprised that the vast majority of the output carbon is in the form of CO2 rather than feces.
Not sure if you know, but in the same vein, I was shocked when I learned ~50% of the biomass of trees is carbon (right, we knew that), but also that the carbon came from CO2 the tree respirated. Also makes total sense in hindsight, but still think it's so cool.
The trees literally build their mass from the air and sunlight (and yes, obviously also water and trace minerals from the roots).
There is a nice Feynman children's lecture about this [0] from the series "Fun to Imagine" [1]
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITpDrdtGAmo
1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0198zc1
And when you set them on fire, it lets the air and sunlight back out!
On water reclamation:
> On the Mir space station, this used to happen organically. Collecting water was a grubby job that involved chasing beach-ball sized spheres of condensate around the colder parts of the spacecraft with trash bags before they could climb into the walls and cause mayhem. Crew members spent three to four hours a day on this dirty and difficult task.
That sounds, frankly, horrible.
It made me think that the average space module probably smells like moist, reheated ass, too.
Mir famously stank. Though you'd be glad to know without gravity your nose doesn't work as well
Yep! There was a submariner-turned-astronaut that mentioned the smell was pretty similar, and also that submarine deployments can be described as "breathing recycled farts for six months." At least submarines have replacement oxygen handy!
>and 1.8 kilos of dried food a day to stay alive.
Isn't that a lot? A stick of bread is 0.25kg, burger patties no more than 0.2kg, and so on.
1.8kg of common food is 5000 Calories-ish. I can only imagine that dried food is more calories per weight. So yeah, a lot.
A lot of problems mentioned in the article are solvable by adding more mass - for supplies and spare parts. New generation reusable rockets can allow this. In the past it was costly to launch a rocket, so systems were designed to be compact, but complex/fragile. Cheap space access changes this equation.
Haven't many of the non-zero-g challenges been at least partly solved on nuclear submarines, that carry large crews and stay submerged for months at time? Of course there are more challenges, but you do have people living in a pressure canister for long periods.
I think the difference is largely due to the fact that bringing a bit of extra weight isn't as problematic in a submarine as it is in a spacecraft. For example, you always have a water source that can give you oxygen and you don't have to worry about discarding the byproducts.