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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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IN CASE YOU HAVE EVER WANTED TO DRINK YOUR OWN URINE…..

There’s technology to help!! Actually, this is the King of Water Purification Systems - developed for the space program, but now being deployed around the world, as well.

NASA desperately needs this technology. Water makes for a heavy - and expensive - payload. Over the past five years, the agency has spent $60 million delivering potable water to the International Space Station on the space shuttle (6 tons at a cost of about $40,000 per gallon). Deploying the Water Recovery System on the ISS will cut the volume of water hauled into space by two-thirds and free up enough room on the shuttle for four more astronauts.

The ARTICLE reveals more than you actually want to know about earlier space flights, as well as the fact that the Space Shuttle treats liquid waste the same way that the railroads did (and still do in some countries)!!

But, what’s inspiring is the “down-to-earth” uses of the technology, and how people’s lives are being improved. This is something to remind folk who say that the space program is a complete waste—although I do tend to wonder if we might not work on this kind of thing even absent the millions we’ve put in to the Shuttle….....anyhow:

Water Security has already begun putting the technology to work in areas where freshwater is in short supply. This summer, global relief agency Concern for Kids deployed a foot-powered purification unit in northern Iraq. Robert and Roni Anderson, Concern’s founders, loaded it onto the back of a Toyota pickup and drove to dozens of villages to purify their groundwater. The unit pumps out 5 gallons per minute, and a single day of purification can sustain a village of 5,000 people for a month. The cost is about 3 cents a gallon. Iraqi water companies, by comparison, charge $4 a gallon.

It’s not just war-torn regions that are short on potable water. After the tsunami hit Indonesia last December, much of the freshwater supply became contaminated with salt water and toxic street runoff. Kearney says the Water Security system is perfectly capable of working in such natural-disaster scenarios. After all, the technology was originally tested on an open sewage ditch in Jakarta and produced water that met Environmental Protection Agency standards.

READ the whole thing.

(Hat Tip: Arts and Letters Daily, one of my favorite sites.)

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/11 at 10:44 AM

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