Since 2002, Texas Tech has partnered with NASA to find a solution for water-waste to be immediately reused for astronauts in space.
Texas Tech Professor Andrew Jackson, and one of the leaders of this research team, claimed the further in space astronauts travel, the more money it takes to provide more equipment to support the mission.
“Instead of bringing all of the water with them, they’ll take a small amount of water with them, and reuse it over and over and over,” Jackson said. “And this is kind of what we do on earth.”
Therefore, astronauts take their waste-water, clean it, and immediately reuse it for drinking water.
“On Earth we have big buffers,” Jackson said. “So we consume water, we clean it, we put it back in the environment. And then somebody down stream takes that water out and we reuse it over and over. Usually, people don’t think about that because it’s a river you’re taking it from.”
In collaboration with Texas Tech’s Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies Dr. Audrie Morson and about thirty Texas Tech students, their primary focus is to create a bio-reactor that will clean the high concentrated water as a partial step to the overall process.
Their research is funded by NASA as part of their small business program.
The research team’s next step is to give their data to NASA. NASA will later give a flight demonstration to examine the technology working in space, according to Jackson.
