William Atkins
Thursday, 21 May 2009 19:08
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
The NASA article stated,
“Mission Control radioed the news to the crew Wednesday, following a report from the Water Recovery System team that station program managers approved. The decision is an important milestone in the development of the station's environmental and life support systems, which will begin supporting six-person crews at the end of May.”
During the toasting of the purified water, flight engineer Barratt stated,
“This has been the stuff of science fiction. Everybody's talked about recycling water in a closed loop system, but nobody's ever done it before. Here we are today with the first round of recycled water. We're really happy for this day and for the team that put this together. This is the kind of technology that will get us to the moon and further."
Kirk Shireman, ISS deputy program manager at JSC, stated, "
This is an important milestone in the development of the space station. This system will reduce the amount of water we must launch to the station once the shuttle retires and also test out a key technology required for sending humans on long duration missions to the moon and Mars."
The celebratory toast, with water bags, of the purified water by the ISS
Expedition 19 crew airs on NASA Television at various times over the next few days. Check your local programming for these times. In addition, check out
http://www.nasa.gov/ntv for streaming video, downlink, and scheduling information on NASA TV on the Web.
For additional information about the space station and the new recycling system, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/station.
The NASA article “
Water on the Space Station” also contains more information on the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) Water Recycling System (WRS), developed by the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (Huntsville, Alabama).
Within the article, it states,
“The ECLSS Water Recycling System (WRS), developed at the MSFC, will reclaim waste waters from the Space Shuttle's fuel cells, from urine, from oral hygiene and hand washing, and by condensing humidity from the air. Without such careful recycling 40,000 pounds per year of water from Earth would be required to resupply a minimum of four crewmembers for the life of the station.”
And,
“It might sound disgusting, but water leaving the space station's purification machines will be cleaner than what most of us drink on Earth.”
Page three concludes.
