The Space Potty

[The-Hammer]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1wwzwvfsC0

[lastone]

Years ago, I worked with a man at System Planning Corp. who worked on the origional unit design. The interesting thing I learned was the solids, after being exposed to the vaccuum of space could not be cast off toward the sun. They have to bring em' back! I'm guessing this is true for the space station too.

So why is there no "Space Fertilizer? There has to be tons of dry crap coming back.

[The-Hammer]

There are two toilets on the ISS: one in the Russian section, one in the US section.

The US toilet is the same design as the Russian toilet, NASA actually just bought a Russian toilet for considerably cheaper than they could have designed one from scratch.

They both handle solid waste the same way, they waste is stored in metal containers and packed into a visiting Russian Progress, ESA Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), or JAXA H-IIB Transfer Vehicle (HTV) which are de-orbited and burn up in the atmosphere.

Liquid waste on the Russian side is stored temporarily in tanks in the Zvezda Service Module, then transferred into tanks on a Progress or ATV. The SM tanks are necessary because there is not always a cargo vehicle docked and because the tanks on the cargo vehicles are full of water when they launch. There are separate tanks for water and liquid waste in the SM, but there's no need on the cargo vehicles.

Liquid waste on the US side is partially reprocessed into drinking water. On this part, I'm fuzzy, but I think they recover about 65% of the liquid waste.

[lastone]

So, now days they burn the crap in the atmosphere. Now I know what that smell is !!!

You know what this means???

A sat could be knocked out of orbit by a can of crap!

The third world war could begin over a can of crap!

If the can deflects off the atmosphere, another planet could be contaminated by our crap!

Little green men could turn brown!

OH, NO!!!

just a thought