The view may be unbeatable, but apart from that, life in space is also uncomfortable. One often feeds on bags and cans, there is usually no shower or bathtub, and you have to be laboriously prepared for a short walk to the door. And soon the housework could also be more: NASA wants to enable astronauts to wash their clothes in space. To this end, the US space agency has signed an agreement with the detergent brand “Tide” of the consumer goods company Procter & Gamble. A space detergent is to be tested on board the International Space Station (ISS) from 2022.
So far, household activities in space have largely been limited to cleaning and vacuuming, which often fills a good part of the Saturday. Sorting, washing, drying, ironing and folding dirty clothes can be saved on the other hand. With the exception of underwear, everything is worn as long as possible. What smells too much to be reasonable – after all, astronauts have to do several hours of exercise a day to counteract muscle wasting – ends up in the trash. It is collected in a docked transport capsule and sent towards Earth at the next opportunity to burn up in the atmosphere. Transporting worn clothes back to the nearest washing machine, 400 kilometers further down, would not be worthwhile.
Urine is also made into drinking water
“Actually, a space washing machine would not be too much of a technical challenge,” says Volker Schmid from the German Aerospace Center. The only problem is the space requirement. After all, water in space is much more valuable than clean T-shirts: around 90 percent of the water used, including the urine of the astronauts, is recycled into drinking water. A washing system should ideally also have its own closed water cycle, “that could fill an entire payload compartment,” says Schmid. There is currently no such space on the ISS – especially since the throw-away logistics work.
At the latest for a longer lunar mission or even more so for a manned flight to Mars, which would take around three years, a kind of washing machine is needed. According to NASA, there are around 70 kilograms of disposable clothing per astronaut per year, which would probably be too much to carry with you to Mars.
There have been approaches to solving the laundry problem several times. As the US science author Mary Roach writes in her book “Packing for Mars”, there were already considerations in 1964 – albeit apparently with little enthusiasm – whether astronaut clothing could be made into food from plant or animal fibers. The US astronaut Don Pettit, on the other hand, on the sixth ISS mission from 2002 to 2003 as a science officer on board, used old underwear combined with Russian space toilet paper as a substrate for tomato and basil plants.
However, NASA is currently more likely to orient itself towards Pettit’s commander Ken Bowersox when it comes to the laundry issue. Among other things, it is known for a simple technique that he used to wash his favorite shorts on board the ISS – in a plastic bag.