One Small Flush For Man

Researchers at the University of North Dakota are working on a NASA-funded mobile wastewater system that basically tries to turn astronaut bathroom habits into space farming fuel. Yes, your leftovers from toilets, showers, laundry, and food could one day be recycled into plant nutrients in space.

The setup uses three bioreactors, each assigned its own category of human mess to break down and repurpose.

And honestly, it’s a pretty big upgrade from the Apollo era, when astronauts weren’t exactly recycling anything, NASA’s early crews famously left about 96 bags of waste sitting on the Moon like a very unglamorous time capsule of “we’ll deal with this later.”
Lana Backman