NASA announced that the International Space Station’s (ISS) Environmental Control and LIfe Support System (ECLSS) was able to successfully recycle 98% of all the water astronauts bring on the station — that includes pee and sweat.
This new milestone can be very beneficial in future missions to the moon and beyond. To capture the liquids astronauts emit, the ECLSS uses “advanced dehumidifiers” that can collect the moisture from the astronauts’ breaths and sweat.
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There’s also the “Urine Processor Assembly” that uses vacuum distillation to collect the astronauts’ urine. NASA explains that the distillation process produces water and a urine brine still has reclaimable H2O.
NASA recently started testing a new tech that can help extract the H2O remaining in the brine. Now, thanks to that new system, NASA said that they were able to increase the water recovery rate on the ISS to 98%, up from the previous 93% to 94%.
For those who are grossed out about the thought of drinking their own urine, NASA’s water subsystems manager Jill Williamson said: “The processing is fundamentally similar to some terrestrial water distribution systems, just done in microgravity.”
“The crew is not drinking urine; they are drinking water that has been reclaimed, filtered, and cleaned such that it is cleaner than what we drink here on Earth,” he added.