NASA Finding Ways to Re-use Waste

Oct. 26 -- So you want to go to Mars? Here’s something to think about.

You’re going to have to eat and drink the same things, over and over again. What comes out of your body will have to go back in again, day after day after day.

NASA estimates that it would take more than 13 tons of water, food and air to keep one person in space for one year. So a three-person crew on a two year mission to Mars would need to take along at least 78 tons of stuff just to stay alive.

That isn’t going to happen, according to John Warwick, chairman of the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences at the University of Florida, who heads up an innovative new NASA project. No one’s going to Mars unless the payload of life-sustaining necessities can be dramatically reduced, he says.

Mission to Re-Use

“When you go to Mars, you’re looking at being gone for a long period of time,” Warwick says, and it wouldn’t be possible to carry enough water, let alone food, to keep you alive. “There’s no way you can afford to launch the quantity of water that would be required.”

The answer, he says, is to come up with the ultimate in recycling technologies. Everything will have to be recycled, from packaging materials to human wastes, both liquid and solid.

Warwick is director of the newly established Environmental Systems Commercial Space Technology Center on the Gainesville campus of the University of Florida. The center is funded by NASA for five years to the tune of $2.5 million. Its purpose is two-fold: to meet the needs of NASA for the level of recycling that will be necessary for long term space flight, and at the same time develop technologies that can be used here on Earth.

NASA has already experimented with recycling of waste water, including human urine, and the International Space Station is expected to use some recycling. But the space station can be resupplied fairly easily because it will remain close to the Earth, so the urgency there is not as great as for a trip to Mars that could take at least two years.