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SpanishCosmic toilet, cosmic price
“Space, endless expanses. The year is 2020. These are the adventures of the ISS space station:… "
NASA has announced tests for a new toilet to be installed on the International Space Station (ISS). The entire $ 23 million set was intended primarily for women. If the tests are successful, this high-tech toilet will be used during the Artemis II mission in three years.
Most of the room toilets developed to date work with negative pressure, which draws the "effects of human metabolism" away from the body and transfers it to appropriate storage systems. Now the Universal Waste Management System (UWMS) has been designed, which can be translated using the Universal Waste Management System. It works on a similar principle but has a number of new features that help maintain hygiene and reduce odors, which is quite important in the tight spaces of spacecraft.
New space toilet:
NASA reports that the UWMS is 65 percent smaller and 40 percent lighter than the toilet that has been on the ISS since the 1990s. One of the most important improvements is the automatic start of suction as soon as the toilet lid is lifted. This is to help reduce the spread of unpleasant odors.
Since the toilet is designed for people who are weightless, it will also have foot mounts and special guides to "anchor" the astronauts. In the old design, special thigh straps were used for this purpose.
Although the information from NASA does not make it clear that the new space toilet will be comfortable, the agency's experts believe it will be a more efficient project than the solutions in use today. According to NASA, the new toilet cleans and maintains itself faster, especially thanks to the new solutions for urine drainage. The toilet is also intended to be completely isolated from other parts of the spaceship to ensure user privacy.
"Today's coffee is also tomorrow's coffee".
The new toilet has also increased the efficiency of recycling the urine astronauts drink after being filtered and treated. - On the space station we process around 90 percent of all liquids, including urine and sweat, "says astronaut Jessica Meir, who in 2019 became the first female astronaut to take part in a historic space walk with Christina Koch, in which only women took part To mimic elements of the earth's natural water cycle in order to recover water from the air, and as far as our urine on the ISS is concerned, today's coffee is also tomorrow! - jokes Meir.
When it comes to fecal matter, most of it goes to the cargo module, which burns when it re-enters the atmosphere. A small amount of fecal matter goes to special tanks and then to Earth, where it is used to study metabolic changes in humans in space.
Earlier versions of the space toilet were primarily geared towards the needs of men. Now the UWMS has also been designed for women. In particular, we are talking about a new suction funnel that better accommodates the anatomy of women.
The art of weightlessness in space has always been a challenge for people. Astronaut Peggy Whitson, still the record holder of the longest total time an American astronaut has spent in space, spoke about the annoyance of using the toilet on the ISS in 2018. - Peeing is relatively easy. Number two ... is more difficult because you have to achieve a pretty small goal, she said.