Expedition 44 Commander Gennady Padalka of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Flight Engineers Scott Kelly of NASA and Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos will move the Soyuz from the station’s Poisk module to the Zvezda docking port.
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US astronauts on board the global Space Station (ISS) have resumed recycling their urine into drinking water after an unmanned Japanese craft carrying supplies successfully docked with the station on 24 August.
Anyway, because it made sense to have different water filtration systems no one argued when the U.S. side of the space station decided to use iodine and the Russians went with silver.
The split is mainly the result of decades-old differences between the two sides over how best to disinfect water. And in the last 12 months there has been plenty of failures. In June, Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket disintegrated less than three minutes after launching from Cape Canaveral, Fla., sending a cargo capsule plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean.
Along with its precious cargo were whiskey samples from Japanese beverage company Suntory where several samples were placed in pouches for a one year maturation project.
Condensate is basically a nicer way of saying the breath, shower runoff, sweat & animal urine. Layne Carter, the water subsystem manager said that it tasted just like regular bottled water.
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All cargos carried water-processing tools necessary to ISS astronauts. While Nasa prefers iodine as its purifying substance, the Russians opt for silver, which in its ionic form is a powerful antimicrobial agent. She said that it was all about getting past the psychological barrier that you are drinking recycled urine & condensate taken from the air. And doing that requires every single droplet to be recycled since a single pint of fresh water costs $10,000 to be ferried from Earth to the ISS.
