Given the title of the subjacent slog post, you should have titled this one: "High-Tech Leaking"

Earthbound, Greywater recycling for offgrid living is becoming more prevalent.

Solar
Fuel Cells
Greywater
Moisture Collectors

Pretty soon you'll be able to put a house anywhere on Earth.
Without hookups.
Just like on Mars.

Charles, your education, such as it is, is a great diservice to you. You seem to have a pathological need to see everything through your ideology.

There's a very simple reason that recycling waste water is coming up now instead of 50 years ago: necessity. If you're going to the moon or orbiting the Earth, you can carry the water you need with you. In fact, any apparatus that would convert urine to drinkable water would be far bulkier than the water itself. If you're going on a much longer voyage, or trying to establish permanent bases elsewhere, then at that point necessity dictates that you reuse your water supply.

And the era of the astronaut is not over. Assuming humans don't destroy ourselves, we will be back traveling through space within decades. Our ambition has temporarily outstripped our technology. Going to the moon is like puttering around the harbor in a rowboat. Going anyplace else in the solar system is like an voyage on the open ocean.

They've been recycling urine on the international space station since 2009. I think this story is more about a better urine recycling system, rather than the idea of recycling urine.

I just don't see how they can store enough food and water and air for interplanetary exploration. Birds exploit more nutrition from what they eat and they use oxygen more efficiently as well. Maybe we could use stem cells to change our metabolisms.

For short-term missions there'd be no point to recycling urine -- it's less failure-prone and probably lighter-weight to carry water and dump urine into space. For longer missions ... I don't know about Skylab or Mir, but the ISS already has a urine processing system, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS_ECLSS#W…. Humans also exhale a lot of water vapor -- animal metabolism makes us net producers of water from our food and oxygen, despite having to drink -- so there's ample recycled water on board. Some is diverted to an electrolysis unit that makes it into oxygen, but apparently that breaks down frequently, so I suspect drinking water is no problem up there.

The article looks like it describes an improved recycling system that also produces power, though whether it produces enough to run itself isn't clear. It sounds like it might be useful, and the approach seems novel, but the general idea is old enough and well-enough developed that it's flying today.

The space age is mostly over?

I don't think it's even begun yet. Launching a couple rockets at our nearest satellite and a few probes at other planets is NOT a space age. It's barely even baby steps.

The real beginning of humanity's space age is ages away (if we survive that long, of course).

@6 and @3, the article, and i reread it, makes no mention ISS and other purification systems and presents the idea as basically very new. as i said, mine was a guess and not a fact.

@5:

This is one of the reasons why Mars is a much more attractive destination than, say, going back to the moon. Because Mars' atmosphere is primarily carbon dioxide, it actually provides most of the chemical raw materials for manufacturing air, water and fuel, not to mention sustaining plant life. So, technically it's feasible to transport only some of the raw consumables astronauts would need, and create enough in situ to resupply for the return trip, thus cutting down considerably on the all-important weight considerations.

And Chaz, I suggest you get your nose out of the Hegel and Marx for a bit and pick up Andy Weir's "The Martian" for a good primer on exactly why manned spaceflight is not only NOT a dead-end, but absolutely necessary to our long-term survival as a species.

@9: You've got my whole-hearted agreement on Martian in situ resources.

In response to Charles, I'd suggest being cautious about using Science Daily as a sole source. It's been quite a while since I read them regularly, but I recall them tending to act more as a press release relay, so their stories often lack context that would be important for the non-specialist.

#7

I agree with Charles.

Or rather with McLuhan, who said that NASA was obsolete, because its mission was Newtonian.

The telegraph let us communicate at light speed.

Nuff said.

I am going to assume that @3 is correct on mass of water vs mass of reverse osmosis device, though stripping urea/nitrogen from water isn't easy(ask the kidneys, using ~17% of our bodies energy to do just that) so I'm assuming energy concerns also played a role.
Mudede's point remains though, think about all the space junk we toss.

@9 @11 Exploring Mars is good scientifically, but mars is a dead end for long term habitats for the simple reason that Mars has no magnetic field or atmosphere to protect from cosmic radiation. The real long term colonization hope is Venus, with her deep atmosphere allowing buildings/cities/ships to float in orbit while shielded from radiation. If we were birds this would be immediately apparent, but our 2D minds only view surfaces as habitable.

@8 Your "guess" attributing 19th Century colonial motivations to the technological decisions about urine disposal in 1960s space exploration isn't really a guess, it's a theory-laden contention and not a particularly apt one. You undermine your own credibility when you aren't more judicious in applying your otherwise very worthy agenda.

As Russell Schweickart, Apollo 9 astronaut said: The most beautiful sight in orbit is a urine dump at sunset!

#14

Travelling to other planets is like one of those vacations that parents plan for their families that they think the "kids will love" because it will be so educational.

But when they get there everyone is bored because they'd rather be at home playing XBox. Only time something interesting happens is when their friends from Earth call to find out how boring their life is and why aren't they coming to the party on Saturday. "God, I wish...but like my stupid parents took me to like Mars..."

@14:

While those considerations might be somewhat attractive, the simple fact is that going to Venus is quite literally "going in the wrong direction", not only because of the considerable energy requirements to travel into and out of Sol's gravity well, but also because of the relative dearth of resources. And of course it presents its own particular challenges in terms of extracting resources; atmospheric pressures make exploitaion of resources from the surface extremely problematic, to cite just one example.

On the other hand, the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter probably is rife with minerals; the Jovian moons are starting to look more attractive in terms of both resourses and perhaps even the sorts of protective atmospheres lacking on Mars, and we have a pretty good idea about the prevalence of water resources regularly shuttling into the inner system from the far-distant Kuiper belt. So, the opportunities for colonization and exploitation of resources in the long-term appear to be much better going in that direction.

Charles, here's some good reading that is vaguely related to this theme--though doesn't mention urine recycling.

http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/4/ter…

I hope to read more of your ideas on the parallels between different eras of human exploration.

Another thought: Urine recycling was out the question during the golden age of space travel because public image was so much a part of the space program. The narrative was supposed to be that the astronauts were demigods competing with the cosmonaut demigods to reach out and conquer the stars. Demigods (certainly not the best and brightest American demigods) do not drink their own urine.

So, technically it's feasible to transport only some of the raw consumables astronauts would need, and create enough in situ to resupply for the return trip

Return trip. You funny.

@19:

Despite some of the more sensationalist ideas being bandied about in the media recently, return trips are now, and always have been, part of the mission objectives for manned exploration of Mars.

@19,

And how would that work? What kind of equipment would they need to take with them to be able to take off from Mars again? How would they factor in the muscle/skeletal atrophy that results from lower gravity? You do realize that would *kill* the mission crew once they return to Earth?

With existing technology, a two-way trip to Mars is a sci-fi fantasy.

@21:

These things have all already been well-thought through, and in fact numerous "proof of concept" demonstrations have been conducted. The scienctific principals for extracting resources, particularly the "big three" (air, water & volatiles) is solid, and the technological challenges are not, frankly, terribly difficult.

As for the human factor, these are precisely the sort of studies currently being conducted aboard ISS, where astronauts spend up to 6 months at a time in a microgravity environment far more unforgiving than Mars' comparitively benign .38G. And solutions for overcoming these challenges during the outbound and return phases (centrifugal spin, being just the most obvious example) are also very clearly understood.

Seriously, while this may indeed be quite literally "rocket science", the people who work on this stuff are smart - probably some of the best engineering and medical minds on the planet - the only real obstacles at this point are cost and the desire to do so; everything else is solvable.

Again, I would point you in the direction of Weir's book (a novelization to be sure, but based on real-world principles and techniques), along with the work of Robert Zubrin and Apollo 11 astronaut "Buzz" Aldrin for more detailed examinations of what it would take - and what we can do currently - to launch and successfully return a manned Mars mission.

Going to the moon and back was once thought to be just "science fiction"; so was moving through the air or under water, or even travelling faster than a horse can gallop. People said they couldn't be done, it was simply impossible - until we set our minds to overcoming the obstacles. The only thing we lack to turn "fiction" into reality is the will to do so.

didn't Musk's firm already present a shuttle recipe that's supposed to make launches a lot cheaper than they had been? devolution of design and manufacture aspects to the private sector worked with weapons development. why wouldn't the state as a guide rather than the end-all and be-all of the program be useful to continued extension of mission range?

a few other countries have retained their manned space programs, no?

@23:

As I understand it, Musk is simply advocating a "brute force" method: massive boosters sending lots and lots of hardware, along with many people. He thinks we could do this in a decade, maybe a little more, but I think the cost of such a program would be rather prohibitive.

Let's send all the republicans to Mars. Promise them a lifetime support of food and alcohol. They can recycle their urine, have hydroponic fruits and vegetables and stay drunk all the time. This would solve many problems on earth, some actual meaningful work could get done in Govt. without all the ignorance and bullshit that the republicans have caused or country. We could all actually have health care! Affordable health care! What a concept, the republicans could listen to the EARTH NEWS every day on their irridium sattelite network and wish they too were on earth to benefit from this wonderful new program called Affordable Health Care. Too bad they are too fucking stupid to realize that it's here to stay and there is nothing they can do about it.