Astronaut Urine Clogs Space Station Water Recycler!

Astronaut Urine Clogs Space Station Water Recycler!

abcnews.go.com

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA is finding it is not just mechanical glitches that make the International Space Station a tough place to operate.

Engineers trouble-shooting a problem with the station's $250 million water recycling system, which processes urine into clean water for drinking, believe the cause is a high concentration of calcium in the astronauts' urine, which clogs the system.

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Sounds like somebody has a really expensive "going problem"...

Seriously, though, I cannot believe that NASA scientists didn't anticipate high calcium content in the urine, after decades of science proving that astronauts lose calcium at a phenomenal rate in microgravity.

Where else did they think the calcium was going?

— Doc Velocity

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(visit the link for the full news article)







[edit on 1/13/2010 by Doc Velocity]

Would this by any chance have anything to do with the Cocaine NASA is looking for? Just wondering

Peace

To bad they didn't speak to a plumber before hand , for if they had they would have been told just what urine can do to piping .

Well, the reason this article struck me is because

These Are

The NASA Scientists

who have been studying calcium-loss in astronauts for over 40 years!

How is it possible that they could combine $250 million and 40 years of research and MISS on something as basic as PISS?

I'm not trying to be nasty, I'm just trying to figure out what is going wrong at NASA. This seems like an elementary blunder to me. They know calcium is leeched out of human tissues in microgravity, and it is excreted into the Space Station's recycler, right?

So why is it a surprise that the recycler gets clogged with calcium? Why wasn't this anticipated in the early days of designing the water recycler?? Like, DAY ONE?

This says sloppy science to me. Cheesy, amateur R&D. Who fired the geniuses and left the chimps in charge?

— Doc Velocity





[edit on 1/15/2010 by Doc Velocity]

I'd hate to be the guy paying for the plumber to come up, can imagine that'd be a pretty hefty call out fee.