Lengthy Spacewalks Made Easy As Scientists Design Spacesuit That Recycles Pee Into Drinking Water In Five Minutes

Scientists have designed a spacesuit that recycles urine into drinking water, inspired from author Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune’s “stillsuits”. The suit, now in its prototype stage, collects urine, purifies it and is able to return it to the astronaut within five minutes through a drinking tube.

The suit’s makers, according to the Guardian, hope that it can be deployed for use before the end of the decade. They hope that it will be part of Nasa’s Artemis programme and also it will come to the help of astronauts if they have to perform lengthy spacewalks on upcoming lunar expeditions.

The Artemis programme is also focused on learning how to live and work for prolonged periods on world’s other than our own.

Chris Mason at Cornell University in New York and Sofia Etlin, a researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell University and co-designer of the suit, told news outlets that they want to solve the problems surrounding the current waste management solution.

The details of the prototype were published in the journal Frontiers in Space Technology.

Nasa currently uses the so-called maximum absorbency garment (MAG), a very sophisticated version of an adult diaper. It collects the faeces and urine of the astronauts which end up into the International Space Station’s (ISS) waste system.

The scientists who designed the suit felt that it was a waste of resources.

Mason, while speaking to the New Scientist said they developed an 8-kilogram device around the size of a shoe box that can recycle urine. The urine will be collected through a cup made of moulded silicone to fit around the genitalia, with a different shape and size for women and men.

The system starts working automatically when the astronaut starts to urinate as the silicon cup is connected to a moisture-activated vacuum pump. The collected urine is then diverted to a filtration system that recycles it into water with an efficiency of 87%. This filtration system uses osmosis to extract water from the urine and a pump to separate water from salt.

The process of collecting and purifying 500ml of urine takes only five minutes. The suit can also enrich the purified water with electrolytes and be provided to the astronaut as an energy drink.

The scientists say that they have surveyed astronauts before developing the suit and said that astronauts have complained about Nasa’s MAG pointing out that it is prone to leak, uncomfortable and unhygienic. Some even complained of urinary tract infections (UTIs).

The scientists involved believe that in the future commercial astronauts will not look at MAG favourably unlike astronauts surveyed while designing the suit who said that while using MAGs they at times felt that they could differentiate if it was their urine or their sweat.

“It’s commonplace for the MAG to leak. The astronauts talk about how at a certain point they can’t tell whether it’s urine or sweat any more. They’re like: ‘Yes, I’m an astronaut and this is a burden I have to bear,’” Sofia Etlin, a researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell University and co-designer of the suit, was quoted as saying by the Guardian.

“Astronauts currently have only one litre of water available in their in-suit drink bags. This is insufficient for the planned longer-lasting lunar spacewalks, which can last 10 hours, and even up to 24 hours in an emergency,” she further added.