(Explorer8939) wrote in message . com...

Inquiring minds want to know: couldn't the crew just somehow boil some
urine, and let the condensate collector capture the resulting water
vapor? This water could be used to supply the Elektron and other
systems that can use technical water.
This occured to me as well.

One of Don Petites (if I remember right) "Saturday science" videos
demonstrated boiling in micro-gravity. You would *not* want to try
this with an unpleasant liquid, without some well thought out
containment.

Ahh, here it is:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp6/spacechronicles.html
The videos are well worth watching.

However, you don't actually need to boil it. A urine soaked rag with a
fan blowing over it (and perhaps a light to warm it) could be equally
effective. You could duct from this directly to the contaminant
removal system or AC (which does the condensate removal), to reduce
the ammount of nasty the crew would be forced to breath. Whether this
would be enough is open to question. Also, you would risk overloading,
and perhaps shortening the life of your contaminant removal system.

If you were on the way to mars, you would think long and hard about
this kind of thing. In LEO, it is probably much wiser to just bring
the crew home if things get that tight. Especially since the
Elektron, rather than water, seems to be the weak link at this point.