Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have no washing machine, so NASA and Roscosmos long ago settled on a different solution for dirty clothes: they get packed into a cargo capsule and burned up when it returns to Earth, according to a report by Space Daily.
The International Space Station has been in continuous crewed operation since November 2000. In that time it has hosted more than 280 astronauts from over twenty countries, and every one of them has faced the same practical problem of clothes getting dirty with no way to wash them.
Why there is no washing machine
Space Daily explained that the station has no washing machine because it has no water to spare. Every drop of water aboard the ISS is a precious resource, either shipped up from Earth at a launch cost of roughly 10,000 dollars per kilogram, or extracted and recycled from crew members' urine, sweat and exhaled breath by a purification system that runs continuously in the background.
The station already recycles about 90 percent of the water it produces internally, a rate that far exceeds any comparable industrial recycling system on Earth. But even at that level of efficiency, adding a washing machine would mean using so much extra water in a single cycle that it would fundamentally change the economics of supplying the station.
Wearing clothes as long as possible
According to the report, astronauts simply wear their clothes for as long as reasonably possible. Workout clothing tends to last about two weeks, since each astronaut must do at least one hour of exercise every day to avoid losing bone and muscle mass in microgravity.
How often underwear gets changed depends on the individual crew member, the outlet noted, adding that there is nothing technically special about the fabric itself.
Where the dirty clothes actually go
Once a piece of clothing reaches the end of its usable life, it goes into the station's waste disposal system along with packaging, food waste, outdated equipment and ordinary trash, Space Daily reported. The waste is packed into bags, sealed with tape and stored aboard whichever cargo ship happens to be docked at the station at the time.
Most cargo ships are disposable. They launch from Earth loaded with supplies, get unloaded at the station, are then filled with trash, undock, and are deliberately deorbited over the Pacific Ocean, where they burn up in the upper atmosphere on the way down. SpaceX's Dragon capsule is the exception, since it is reusable and returns to Earth intact by parachute, splashing down in the Pacific.
Worn-out clothing is packed into whatever cargo vehicle is next scheduled to leave the station. On its final descent through the upper atmosphere, that cargo ship briefly appears as a streak of light in the night sky before burning up completely over the Pacific Ocean.
Hot peppers grown in space for 137 days
Space Daily has previously reported on a separate NASA experiment in which chili peppers were grown aboard the International Space Station for more than four months. In June 2021, 48 sterilized seeds of the Hatch pepper variety, an ordinary field crop from New Mexico's Rio Grande Valley rather than a dwarf plant bred for containers, were delivered to the station.
On July 12, astronaut Shane Kimbrough planted the seeds in a plant growth chamber roughly the size of a large microwave oven. Of all the seedlings that sprouted, only four were kept, which was as many as the chamber could support through to full fruit ripening.
