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How NASA Gets Its Astronauts To Drink Their Own Pee Without Gagging

One small drip for man. One giant leak for mankind.
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By 

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

Drinking urine: It’s the dirty little secret of longterm space travel.

The costs of transporting water to the International Space Station and beyond are so cost-prohibitive ― $48,000 per liter ― that NASA engineers had to find cheaper ways of taking H20 into space.

Luckily for science, someone figured out a method. Unluckily for the astronauts, it’s turning their own pee into potable drinking water.

According to “America’s Secret Space Heroes,” a documentary series airing Sundays on the Smithsonian Channel, NASA scientists distilled all the information about urine and created a distillery that turns an astronaut’s whiz into drinking water.

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NASA engineer Jennifer Pruett shows off a distillery that can turn urine into drinking water.
Smithsonian Channel

In the clip above, NASA engineer Jennifer Pruett explains how artificial gravity helps the device work its magic.

“This whole part is the centrifuge that’ll spin. So the urine will be sprayed out along the back wall as it spins,” she said. “The heavy dense fluid will stick to the wall and the lighter steam as it evaporates out will be sucked through the centre through that mesh onto the next part of the system.”

The end result is what she calls “good clean urine distillate” that gets put into a water processor for further filtration before the astronauts actually consume it.

To paraphrase Neil Armstrong: It’s one small drip for man. One giant leak for mankind.

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Before You Go

NASA Space Tourism Posters
The Grand Tour(01 of14)
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NASA's Voyager mission took advantage of a once-every-175-year alignment of the outer planets for a grand tour of the solar system. The twin spacecraft revealed details about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- using each planet's gravity to send them on to the next destination. Voyager set the stage for such ambitious orbiter missions as Galileo to Jupiter and Cassini to Saturn. Today both Voyager spacecraft continue to return valuable science from the far reaches of our solar system. (credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Mars(02 of14)
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This poster imagines a future day when NASA has achieved its vision of human exploration of Mars and takes a nostalgic look back at the great imagined milestones of Mars exploration that will someday be celebrated as historic sites. (credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Ceres(03 of14)
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Europa(04 of14)
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Astonishing geology and the potential to host the conditions for simple life make Jupiter's moon Europa a fascinating destination for future exploration. Beneath its icy surface, Europa is believed to conceal a global ocean of salty liquid water twice the volume of Earth's oceans. Tugging and flexing from Jupiter's gravity generates enough heat to keep the ocean from freezing. On Earth, wherever we find water, we find life. What will NASA's Europa mission find when it heads for this intriguing moon in the 2020s. (credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech)
First Exoplanet(05 of14)
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Jupiter(09 of14)
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Kepler-186f(11 of14)
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PSO J318.5-22(12 of14)
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