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I went to the BBC story kindly submitted here to read it. At the BBC story that opens this thread, I see a linked BBC story "Solving a Space Station's Toilet-Sh

I went to the BBC story kindly submitted here to read it. At the BBC story that opens this thread, I see a linked BBC story "Solving a Space Station's Toilet-Shaped Problem"[1] describing how difficult it has been to do water recycling on the International Space Station, where the extreme cost of transporting more water up into near earth orbit would provide a powerful incentive to develop technology to recycle water. Being in free fall in the limited space (and isolation from earth's ecosystem) of the space station provides its own tough engineering challenges, but evidently even rocket scientists haven't completely figured out how to do toilet-to-tap water recycling in all needed cases. [1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150527-solving-a-space-stations-toilet-shaped-problem http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150527-solving-a-space-sta...

Cyph0n 11y ago
What do rocket scientists have to do with designing water purification systems?
- tokenadult 11y ago
  What do rocket scientists have to do with designing water purification systems? On the assumption that you may not be a native speaker of English, I'll mention that here in the United States, at least, the term "rocket scientist" (which some people who work on the International Space Station project literally are) is a synonym for "very smart person." In other words, my statement is that even though the International Space Station presumably has enough prestige and budget as a project to hire very capable engineers, those engineers have not found it easy to design a toilet-to-tap water treatment system (as the linked article in my first comment reports). Yes, designing a system to work in free fall while confined to the space station is itself a difficult engineering problem, but even here on earth in normal-g conditions, it looks like there is a lot of engineering work still to do on the problem of potable water recycling.
  - Cyph0n 11y ago
    Ah, I misread the context. Thanks for the clarification.
  - fleitz 11y ago
    It's really more of an issue of space / weight, it's pretty easy to setup a water recycling system on earth just by using the right soils, plants, etc.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  They determine the cost of not recycling the water, which is strongly linked to the cost of transporting a kilogram of anything to low Earth orbit.

Cyph0n 11y ago

What do rocket scientists have to do with designing water purification systems?

tokenadult 11y ago
What do rocket scientists have to do with designing water purification systems? On the assumption that you may not be a native speaker of English, I'll mention that here in the United States, at least, the term "rocket scientist" (which some people who work on the International Space Station project literally are) is a synonym for "very smart person." In other words, my statement is that even though the International Space Station presumably has enough prestige and budget as a project to hire very capable engineers, those engineers have not found it easy to design a toilet-to-tap water treatment system (as the linked article in my first comment reports). Yes, designing a system to work in free fall while confined to the space station is itself a difficult engineering problem, but even here on earth in normal-g conditions, it looks like there is a lot of engineering work still to do on the problem of potable water recycling.
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  Ah, I misread the context. Thanks for the clarification.
- fleitz 11y ago
  It's really more of an issue of space / weight, it's pretty easy to setup a water recycling system on earth just by using the right soils, plants, etc.
logfromblammo 11y ago
They determine the cost of not recycling the water, which is strongly linked to the cost of transporting a kilogram of anything to low Earth orbit.