Also in microgravity clothes tend to float away from the skin, slowing their absorption of sweat and oils.Ĭommander Ken Bowersox of Crew 6 washed his shorts in a plastic bag!Īnother way to save mass is to find ways to use soiled laundry. Spacecraft environments are engineered to maintain a comfortable temperature and humidity, which reduces sweating. Simple things like wearing the same clothes on alternating days helps. One key strategy is to somehow make clothes soil slower. Certainly to go beyond Mars, we reach a point where cleaning laundry in microgravity, and reclaiming used air and water, becomes more mass- and power-efficient than bringing hundreds of pounds of limited-use garments per person on every mission. While this sanitizes the clothing with unparalleled effectiveness, it also makes them impossible to wear again.īut for the journey to Mars, which takes six or seven months in microgravity with no chance for resupply, with current methods every astronaut would require at least 35 kilos (75 pounds) of laundry per transit. Used clothes and linens are later packed into the resupply vessel which then undocks, de-orbits, and burns up as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. Fresh new clothes and linens, rigorously washed many times on Earth to remove lint, are launched aboard a resupply mission. Lugging all that laundry around is still lighter and cheaper than bringing a washer and dryer with you, especially if you’d be shipping them to space at a cost of roughly $50,000 per kilogram.Įvery space station we’ve built so far has orbited just a few hundred miles above the Earth, so while missions can last up to a year, laundry is just part of the resupply process. The longest Apollo and Shuttle missions were generally about two weeks long, which you may know from experience you can pack for. But surely it’s just a matter of engineering, right? If other hygiene activities like showering have been successfully adapted for life in space, why not laundry? Making Do Withoutįor shorter missions it’s just not needed. All that sudsy water, heat cycling, spinning mass, and even the buildup of static electricity, lint, or fumes could compromise a mission or even cost lives. In the microgravity environment of space, just about every single aspect of how we do our laundry here on Earth becomes a deadly hazard with a single point of failure. What is the greatest challenge facing humans as we prepare for the first crewed missions to Mars? Solar and cosmic radiation? Atrophying bone and muscle? Growing food? How about laundry? It’s strange but true, right now we don’t have a way to clean laundry in space.
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