'Dune'-Inspired Spacesuit Turns Astronauts' Urine into Drinkable Water | Hacker News Reader

'Dune'-Inspired Spacesuit Turns Astronauts' Urine into Drinkable Water

wsj.com

42 pointsgnicholas41 comments

One of the first exhibits in San Francisco Exploratorium is a toilet with a water fountain and a description explaining that it's from a clean water source. Knowing this, would you still drink the water from the toilet? It's such a fascinating exercise in psychology. The urine to drinkable water obviously takes this one step further.

https://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/a-sip-of-conflict

IDK... given how dumb people can be:

Reward: some water you can easily get elsewhere.

Risk: someone like a security guard or employee peed in it at some point because they're a jerk.

Unless it's different than the one I've used the fountain comes from the supply, not the tank. So it doesn't matter if anybody peed in it.

If it's a dude peeing in it, it'd splash a bit.

And why would that matter? You're not drinking from a cup, but a fountain. All the water you're drinking would have been in the pipe while the dude was peeing.

It's just a water fountain that happens to be mounted on a toilet bowl. They're not sourcing their own water.

The worst thing that could happen is the person in front of you spits on the outlet (like kids do in elementary school in America).

It can always be worse: remember the story news outlets touted about a Japanese scientist who created meat from human excrement which was debunked, TIL today?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2011/07/08/meat-m...

I've drank from this fountain. With a stillsuit, I think it would be more palatable because you don't have the visual connotation right in front of you unlike the Exploratorium exhibit.

Not the visuals, sure, but there's the question of the salt (they say it's reclaimed, I don't know where it ends up) - we probably want all those back, and the fact that it would be body temperature.

This is not far from a real product in Japan: a toilet with a hand washing sink on the top. Presumably the water used to wash your hands is reused flush, saving water.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sink-toilet-japan/

Attaching it to human makes it a moving part. Put it in a box somewhere and it will be more reliable. This is the exactly same stupid idea as solar frikin' roadways. Take that solar panel and put it next to the road.

Above road

Great idea, probably dependent upon latitude. In disconnected panels. Enough to provide sufficient light during a cloudy day. Would simultaneously decrease the amount of AC required during summer months, and maybe improve safety by reducing sunlight into the eyes of drivers (human or otherwise).

So would green cages, or wired mesh allowing for ivy and vegetation growth, arching over roadways.

There's a number of edge-case scenarios where you want a lot of height clearance above roadways. ie: hauling a wind turbine blade or rapidly converting to an airfield.

Eh we deal with overpasses, pedestrian bridges, etc. I’m not convinced above road solar will be so widespread so quick we can’t actually logistic turbine blades

Currently, astronauts just use a diaper and a 1L water bottle. This suit would seem to be an improvement.

What they really need is a mop wringer and a good filter.

I wouldn't volunteer to be the first guy to try that out.

This feels reminiscent of the American Billion Dollar Space Pen vs Russian Pencil.

Silly Americans, just drink urine! - Bear Grylls, probably.

Urban legend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...

Yes I'm aware. You'll notice my hardly coherent comment makes even less sense if you're not aware of the totality of the circumstances surrounding the pen/pencil story and the ludicrousness of Bear Grylls drinking his own urine. (Comparable to loose graphite shavings in a space station!)

This is a really cool development, but there is a certain slice of the population who have watched Bear Grylls who believe you can simply drink your own urine and it's good for you. Similar to how a certainly slice of the population truly believes the US Govt spent $1B developing a pen, while the Russians simply used a pencil.

The space pen was made completely privately, with completely private investment, by a pen company that saw on opportunity. They privately built a pen that would work in space, gave it to NASA for clout, and then sold to the public. They spent a few millions on it, not billions.

The Soviets bought a hundred of them a few years after. Because "Just use a pencil stupid" is incredibly stupid in fact. Lose graphite particles or scraps are a terrible thing to have in your space craft in zero gravity. They cost about $30 each in today's dollars.

Didn't the soviets use at least grease pencils? No graphite in them, just non-conductive wax.

Or a biro? Don't they work by capillary action rather than gravity?

Yes. The only advantage of the "space pen" is that it works upside down. Ballpoint pens work fine in microgravity, but not directly inverted.

Don't agree -w/all this cynicism... (Did I get a programmer's joke to work?)

Your fastest open-cycle resource usage is water. If you can recycle your water, you've got much slower mass-growth per unit of time in free flight. This could make the difference between 8 hour spacewalk capabilities and 8 day spacewalks.

Things break. Moving things break much more frequently. In space, where any error can easily be fatal, you generally want to keep things as simple as possible to complete the task at hand. As well, when things break you want them to be as easy to repair as possible. Complexity should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, or in cases where the benefit provided is tremendous. Extremely lengthy spacewalks won't happen for numerous reasons (oxygen, battery, exhaustion, radiation, and so on) so that's not really even a desirable goal.

> Extremely lengthy spacewalks won't happen for numerous reasons (oxygen, battery, exhaustion, radiation, and so on) so that's not really even a desirable goal.

You're not thinking creatively enough. When life support fails and astronauts have to live in their suits for extended periods of time, what is the difference between an extended spacewalk and having to live in your suit for a while?

Well I think there's a couple of issues here. The first is that what you're describing probably could not happen because of some technical reasons. There are generally two types of life support failures. The first is a very slow leak. The ISS, for instance, has had a number of these, and will deal with even more as the station continues to age and deteriorate. Air slowly leaks out, or perhaps your scrubber fails and CO2 levels slowly build up. In these situations you already naturally have many days to solve it.

The other is the catastrophic failure, like a major hull breach. In that case, space stations, bases, and submarines are all designed in modules. You cut off the damaged area and move on with repair. If you happen to be in that damaged area, you're dead. These suits are massive, difficult to get into or out of (requiring multiple people), and also require extensive prep/charging/loading to use. As they become more complex, this all just becomes even more true. In this catastrophic failure scenario, the astronaut would be unconscious in seconds and dead shortly thereafter. It's not like you can just hop into a suit, and heck - even if you could you again would not need to be in it for days.

The other more general issue is that you're adding complexity to try (and probably fail) to solve extremely obscure problems. So the net result is an increased chance of running into an issue. We want to be going the other direction unless there's a very good reason not to. Of course avoiding single point of failures is one of those "very good reasons" but I don't see any single point of failure that this would eliminate.

Don't spacesuits mostly use water for cooling, with a supply of ice that gradually absorbs heat (from the closed loop) and sublimates into space?

What about oxygen though

Bear Grylls was the first to buy one.

Bill Gates will be the number two.

Seems like an odd solution. The problem, according to another non-paywalled article [1] is that astronauts complained about lack of liquids on long spacewalks and [glorified] diapers being annoying to wear. So this contraption which has a volume of 38cm by 23cm by 23cm was developed. I say it's weird because that's 20 liters of volume (to say nothing of the additional complexities/breakable stuff involved)! Why not simply use 10 or 20% of the volume and add more room for refreshments? And perhaps keep the idea of providing a tube, and just direct it to a diaper.

Far less complex, far less volume, far less mass, far less likely to break, far cheaper, and probably far more pleasant for the astronaut as well.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/12/scie...

The ideal solution is for the astronauts to drink their own urine. Apparently this can be quite healthy - in moderation like occasional spacewalking, and it's not as if astronauts in general aren't used to all manner extreme limit-pushing.

I would 100% psychosomatically taste the scent of urine in this water

They don't even have to add flavour!

Humans can detect mercaptans down to ppb but I suspect they require a fermentation process to create.

Also, I wonder how it handles eating asparagus.

Ars Technica has a non-paywalled article.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/scientists-built-rea...

also a good way to screen out astronaut candidates

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