Tito's Mars mission to use HUMAN WASTE as radiation shield The team behind a planned private manned mission to Mars say they've come up with a way to protect voyagers from radiation exposure during the long trip: pack the walls of the spacecraft with a layer of the astronauts' own waste. "It's a little queasy sounding, but there's no place for that material to go, and it makes great …
Some few molecules of the 36,500 gallons of water you consume each year has been in the urine of a mongol lord, a prostitute's abortion, and even Hitler's shit. Every glass of water contains molecules of H2O that were once in the bladder of a leper. The sort of folk who travel in space are both more aware of this issue than most and less concerned about it.
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There's no chance of a martian superbug (though it's plausible that some earth-sourced extremophile might be at home there). A one-way manned landing is still a good idea, though. The astronauts would spend the rest of their (probably short) lives there, but they could get a lot of science done. Far more than any robotic probe we can make right now, and it's a good first step towards a sustainable colony too. The only problem is that the public would be appalled at the idea, for some strange moral reason. Eventually China will do it.
"Do not bring back some random virus or bacteria that our probes cannot detect. We are happy to send care packages!"
Congratulations on being the most stupid thing I've read today.
How will these bacteria (so far undiscovered by us on several missions there) fly several thousand miles into space, penetrate the vessel's hull and adapt to a totally alien host, who might have totally differing biology.
In your own time...
If the food and water is to be used as a radiation shield, then surely, consuming them would negate the whole purpose as 1 year old water and food would contain a years worth of accumulated radiation?
Unless of course, the radiations half-life is relatively short. More data required...........
It's been done.
IIRC the Skylab 'naught dried their feces by vacuum exposure for packing in the LOX tank of the re-purposed launch vehicle they were living in.
People have done some work on urine but it seems feces are the #1 unsolved problem in closed cycled life support.
Potentially they offer a rich range of starting options for combining with all that CO2 you have left over. Note in space ultra high vacuum is cheap. We're talking pressures in micro Torr (millionths of a millimetre of Hg). Evacuate a chamber, connect your tank of chopped up feces to it and the water should come off readily. A little gentle centrifuging will get the water to collect.
The aerogel would be in addition to all the original mass for the food. The goal of storing cr@p is to refill the gaps left by taking the food out.
On a side point, can anyone explain to me how aerogels manage to work as radiation shielding? I just can't get my head round how an ultra-low density solid could possibly stop anything.... But then again, I'm just a Computer Science grad....
Anyone have a citation for aerogels insulating against ionizing radiation? The sources I consulted all mention the insulating properties of various aerogels for thermal radiation, which is a rather different problem. (And they mention the use of aerogels in Cherenkov radiators, which is also irrelevant to this application, as far as I can see, though you'd have a nice indication of how much ionizing radiation was hitting your shielding.)
Incidentally - the article mentioned something about NASA working on extracting drinking water from urine. That's old hat, surely, and I've read more than one article on NASA tech for extracting water from solid wastes, so that's not new either. (And indeed it's rather obvious.)
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