Space is something that has always been out there and that we’ve all been curious about. It was a marvel that we’ve been able to travel to various planets and uncover all kinds of things. But as space travel is becoming something that even billionaires and startup companies can do, the more we’ve been curious about tiny details.
For example, do astronauts do laundry in space? The answer to that is no. At this point, NASA has yet to find a way to do laundry and have resourced burning clothes in space instead. However, many individuals have been looking for innovative ways of handling this problem.
There are all kinds of questions we have, but for now let’s focus on one of NASA’s dirty secrets of spaceflight – that there is no laundry day. However many people have come up with all kinds of creative ideas to someday solve this dirty problem for good
Why Can’t They Do Laundry?
There are three core reasons for why doing laundry just doesn’t seem realistic right now. Those being the environmental impact, how water works in space and the costs.
The Environment
Personal hygiene in general has always been different in space for obvious reasons. From gravity to the fact that folks are forced to live inside what is effectively a small shuttle for days amongst other things.
Why astronauts can’t wash clothes is simple: it uses up too much water. When looking at traditional wash machines, the most high-efficiency washers we have right now use 15 to 30 gallons of water to wash clothes.
Paired with the fact that a crew of six aboard the International Space Station (ISS) go through 900 pounds of clothes every year, you can imagine how much water they’ll be going through will be high.
This is before getting into the whole drying aspect which is a whole other problem.
The truth is if astronauts could do laundry in space they’d be using a significant amount of power along with hundreds to thousands of gallons of water per flight. It doesn’t make sense for them to have that so NASA has tried to mitigate the waste by instructing astronauts to wear their clothes until they get too dirty and then throw them out.
How Water Works In Space
Another angle that you can look at for why astronauts can’t do laundry stems from what I said earlier: things work differently in space. As many astronauts have mentioned on video as well as other experts: water specifically works in a different way in space.
Water on Earth typically falls or flows thanks to gravity. But once you lessen or remove gravity from the equation, you’ll find that water floats about in globules until it sticks to something.
So even if it was possible to put a wash machine in a spaceship, the water it would produce wouldn’t do a great job at washing.
This is also furthered by the fact of how astronauts “shower” in space. On the International Space Station (ISS), astronauts shower by taking a sponge bath. This is done by using premixed bags of soap and warm water. Washing their hair comes down to using a special no-rinse shampoo.
Because of that, it makes sense that having a wash machine and dryer in a spaceship wouldn’t make sense.
The Costs
But probably the biggest reason above all else is the cost that would stem from this. At this point in time, it costs NASA $10,000 USD per pound to go from launch to the station. They’d be increasing this cost significantly if they added in more water for washing clothes.
You’ve also got to consider the per pound cost as well since clothes do weigh and can be piled up significantly given time. All those dirty garments will cause weight issues on the ship as well as cause storage issues. This is before getting into the lint and cotton fibres clogging filters as well as having to deal with the smell of dirty clothes.
It doesn’t make sense on a financial point either to cover this specific personal hygiene need compared to the others such as brushing teeth and showering. Not to mention staying hydrated. With water being so precious, it makes sense to save on water by not having such water and power hungry appliances in a spacecraft.
Because of these considerations, it makes sense for NASA to do what they have been doing for the time being. That being that they throw clothes out into space along with the rest of the waste that is produced. By doing this, everything breaks down and eventually gets incinerated by the Earth’s atmosphere.
This also solves environmental concerns as well since this doesn’t have much of an impact on our environment.
So What Can Be Done?
NASA knows this has been a problem for almost a decade now and there have been all kinds of efforts to solve this problem. Even though a concrete solution has yet to be found at this point, you still have to commend those coming up with solutions in this space.
We’ve come a long way from firing people up into space with what could be described as a large tin can and having them live in them for days or even weeks with only wet towelettes and no change of clothes.
However despite these advances, there are still clear problems with many working to solve this issue.
NASA’s Efforts
First is NASA’s own efforts. A study in 2014 was conducted to hopefully find a way to reduce clothing waste by extending how long astronauts could wear clothes for. As part of that study, ISS crew members were provided exercise clothes that were treated with an antimicrobial compound or made of antimicrobial yarn.
The only catch with the clothing for this study was these clothes were designed for astronauts daily two and a half hour exercise regimen – not meant to be worn through the entirety of a day.
That being said, these efforts did spark some new ideas and breakthroughs into this problem.
Antimicrobial Clothes
Three years after that study, Arizona undergraduate research assistant Christina Morrison had an idea for how to solve this issue. Along with the help of a NASA Space Grant and UA professor of microbiology Charles Gerba, the team looked into an alternative laundry technique that would save water but also cut down on the tossing away clothes.
Morrison’s idea was to get the clothes cleaner and less smelly in the process by using a combination of silver and hydrogen peroxide. Both of these elements have strong antibiotic properties on their own, but putting them together would yield a much stronger effect. Particularly when you combined them with water.
Morrison isn’t just proposing to scrub all the astronaut’s clothes in silver and hydrogen peroxide though. What she is thinking about is incorporating silver-ion threads into astronaut clothing. It’s not so different from the lining in socks that kills germs.
To test the idea, Morrison and Gerba took pieces of cloth from antimicrobial socks and gave them low concentrations of hydrogen peroxide. They then exposed those to Staphylococcus aureus, a common bacteria found on human skin.
These efforts found that the swatches exhibited a 99.999 percent reduction in bacteria while the untreated had only a 43.76 percent reduction.
Final Thoughts
While the options available to astronauts are unlike those we have on Earth, these are still developments. As more people are working to solve problems faced in space, the more that space travel for us all will become more of a reality.