John: Good afternoon from Kennedy Space Center, and welcome to a Webcast series of the International Space Station, A Home in Microgravity. My name is John Rau and I'm going to be your host for the next hour.

Our topic today, entitled "Recycling in Space," will be a discussion on the following:

advanced life-support overview, composting, gray water studies, long duration missions to Mars. But before we do, however before we start, I would like to introduce our guest for today.

His name is Jay Garland. He is the overall manager for the Advanced Life-Support Group here at Kennedy. Jay could you tell our viewers who you are and what you do for Kennedy?

Jay: Well, as you said, John, my name is Jay Garland and I've worked here at Kennedy Space Center for about, going on about 13 years now, working with the Advanced Life-Support Program. I'm currently the manager for the research group with the contractor who does the work, called [Dynamac] Corporation. And so as manager, I have to coordinate the overall research, which involves both plant growth studies and the recycling studies we're going to talk about today, and then specifically I do research within the recycling area. That's my own particular background. So that's in general what I do.

John: Okay. List Webcast we talked a little bit about the advanced life support at the beginning of the Webcast. Jay, could you give us an overview of, and how it relates to what you do?

Jay: Yeah. I think the best way to view advanced life support is kind of think of a picnic. If you, what you need to live is food, water, oxygen and so the current view, the current approach to life support for space missions is kind of like a picnic in the sense that they take everything with them, all the food and the oxygen and water they need for the duration of a mission, that's what they do on Space Station now, that's what they did during the Apollo missions.

But that works for short-term missions, but the longer the mission -- if you're going to Mars for example or a permanent Lunar base, your picnic basket gets quite large. And in fact it can get larger than any other part of the mission. It gets larger than the spacecraft itself.

So for that reason, NASA is interested in looking at regenerative life-support systems where you're generating the food and water and oxygen that you need from the waste that you might product during the mission, basically to make the mission more autonomous. You don't have to rely on external supplies or stored materials; you can product them as you go.

John: Okay. And so how is this picture [inaudible] explains, looks kind of like a greenhouse.

Jay: Yeah this is actually a large controlled environment plant chamber from Johnson Space Center. This was a test that they did there a few years ago. It actually had a person living in one chamber, which was linked to this chamber where they were growing wheat plants. This is a wheat plant. They're grown hydroponically, which means they're grown without any soil, just with a nutrient solution, and this is a chamber at Johnson. There's similar types of chambers here at Kennedy Space Center and as well as other universities and other NASA centers.

John: Okay.

Jay: But this is the-, the plants are the basis for this kind of system because they produce, as they grow, they produce food, they produce oxygen and they release water through their leaves as they grow. So they're a mechanism to do all the life support that a person needs potentially on a long-duration mission.

John: Besides wheat, are there any other crops that you?

Jay: Wheat, the ALS program has done work with a lot of common agronomic crops like wheat and potato and soy bean and rice, and it's the picture of potatoes that are grown hydroponically.

The picture that you see here has the tops of the potatoes have been removed and you're just looking at the trays with the potatoes in there. Again you see there's no soil there at all, it's a nutrient solution within those trays.

And then there's also salad crops like tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, strawberry. There's a number of crops on the list.

The only thing that really limits the potential use of a crop is it has to be fairly productive and you also have to be able to contain it in a fairly small space. The real common type of plant that you eat a lot of that isn't on the list is corn, because it tends to be so large. It's not really manageable in a closed system, a small-scale system like this.

John: Okay. We have a chart right here actually. Could you explain this?

Jay: This was one plan for a potential Mars mission. Where in this case the Mars entry vehicle and service habitat and all these materials would be sent to Mars and they actually would-, the Earth return vehicle would be fueled by perhaps in situ resources on Mars. And that would be all ready to go before the people ever went, which is stage II there in the green area. And then they'd be there and they'd come back. But the point of this is-, the relevant part of this is how long this kind of mission would take.

The transit part for the people, they think maybe six months at the best. And then once you get to Mars, you're going to be there for a year. You kind of want to be there for long enough-, you spent a lot of time to get there, you want to be able to explore it. You're trying to look for life perhaps on Mars. And one of the interesting things is due to planetary alignments, once you leave and go there, you can't just turn around any time you feel like it.

Which means you're going to be there for a year and if you miss your return, you might be there for two years, so you really want to have the ability to, in essence, live off the land. To have regeneration of your life-support elements. Because if you're relying on just stored food and something happens, you're really not allowing the astronauts many options for survival. So that's a real important part of a long-duration mission like this, the real importance of regenerable life support.

John: Okay, let's go to the chat room here for a little. From Tammy, she has an interesting question on this topic. Is there a working model for a CELSS from Mars in progress? And what about other planets?

Jay: Tammy, using an older definition or older acronym CELSS stands for Controlled Ecological Live Support System. And when I started working on the program, that's what it was called. Now it's moved to Advanced Life Support, but the idea is still the same, it's trying to develop these closed systems for life support.

Tammy, right now there are-, the closest thing to a working model is development at Johnson Space center which we're going to show one picture of later on where they're planning to put in place a series of chambers where they'll have people and plants and other regeneration equipment in place to try to test out these concepts. But right now, there is nothing-, the full system isn't in place.

What we're working on here and at other places are all different parts of the system, looking at different plants, looking at different recycling technologies. But putting the whole thing together hasn't occurred yet.

John: Okay, thank you. All right, let's step into the actual body of our Webcast and talk a little bit about composting. Well there are a few ways to recycle aboard the International Space Station or in Space. Let's start by talking about composting and why is it important to control solid waste?

Jay: If you're talking about a long-duration mission like this where you have plants growing, you might have noticed that picture of wheat that we had there. You saw a lot of green, and that was mainly the leaves of the plant, the stems of the plant, and for most of the plants that we grow there is a significant portion of inedible material, the things that you're not going to directly eat. And in a closed system, you need to do something with that material or it would just accumulate and be a problem.

So what we do with that, the leaf material and stems, they contain a lot of nutrients that are required for the plants to grow. So if you don't recycle it, that not only are you going to have waste that you're just going to be accumulating, but you're not going to be recycling the nutrients that you would have to bring with you if you don't. So you'd have to have stockpiles of fertilizer that you'd have to bring and again that's more material that you'd have to bring along with you.

John: Right. This picture is composting.

Jay: Right, this picture is-, composting is one mechanism for recycling inedible plant material and other waste material where you use microorganisms to degrade the material, to break it down into its components.

John: Let me show you another shot of that.

Jay: And this picture actually shows the top or the funnel-like part of it is there is compost. Material that's gone through composting which means it's been digested or degraded by microorganisms for a while. And this apparatus is the one that we use where we leached, we'll take the compost, rinse it with water and then in the bottom [col-voy] there, that's the kind of leach-aide or rinsing from the compost, which contains nutrients which we would recycle to the hydroponic systems.

John: Okay. Is there any difference in composting in space compared to here on Earth?

Jay: We don't really know the answer to that yet, because we haven't done experiments with compost in space. It's all been ground-based studies. Obviously, there could be differences if you're doing it in microgravity or not. One important thing to remember here is if you're doing experiments on Space Station or say a transit vehicle where you have microgravity, there is going to be a very different physical environment.

Like you're talking about a system on Mars or the Moon, you will have-, it will be reduced gravity, but you'll have gravity, much more gravity than you would in free space. And therefore the systems might be more similar on a planetary system like that compared to Earth than they would be in microgravity.

John: Okay.

Jay: This is a picture of the composter that we've used for something of our studies.

Composting really is a very simple kind of design. Most people do compost even in their back yard. You just pile up a mass of whatever the material is that you want to digest, you make sure it's mixed at some interval and watered to a certain degree. But this is a system where we've done it just in a closed vessel, where we can control the temperature and how much air we blow through it. So it's just a kind of a fancy version of a back-yard composter.

John: Okay, let's got on to the next picture here. I was going to ask you a question here. This is a scientist actually doing a different form of composting. What kind of method is this?

Jay: It's not actually considered composting, but it's another form of processing the plant material, the inedible parts of the plant, based on microorganisms. Microbes are still doing the job, but it's called a stored tank reactor. In this case instead of being-, a composter mainly is you wet the material but it's mainly solid.

Here you grind up the material and put it into a stirred tank and stir it and in this case, what you get is a liquid stream out of it. You could see this scientist is taking some of the effluent out of the reactor and it's in liquid form. And this, we've tested this system also and used that effluent instead of leaching the compost as you saw in the first picture, you just take the effluent directly out of this reactor.

John: Via…

Jay: Yeah and those-, we were looking at a variety of methods or approaches. Each of them have some benefits and potential weaknesses and what we try and do is get kind of baseline data on how well they each perform and then we can compare them and see what might be most efficient.

John: Okay. And here actually this is one of the other

Jay: Yeah, this is a small-scale composter that one of the scientists is unloading to see-, it's again a tubular design and then pushing out the compost from the inside of the reactor and collecting it for analysis.

John: Okay. I'd like to answer, actually I have a question from the chat room. It pertains to what we've been talking about. Jeremy would like to know what types of food wastes will be recycled for the astronauts to eat again?

Jay: That's a very interesting question. Presently like on Space Station, we don't produce any foods or anything in orbit on Space Station. This is for, what we're talking about is for longer term. But there is a lot of food waste on Space Station, uneaten food. So, which can be a problem. You want to make sure that-, and in the most efficient system, you make sure the astronauts eat all their food because if they don't, we've got a waste problem to deal with.

But if you actually are producing your own food, not only would you have the uneaten part of the food that you'd have to deal with, but you'd also have waste from processing the food. You think about you take a potato, and unless you're going to eat the potato whole, if you're going to peel it or whatever or if you're going to take wheat seeds and thresh them, you've going to have different food processing wastes as well as just uneaten food.

John: Okay. Here's a question from Norman. What types of recycling are being studied presently besides the ones we've been talking about?

Jay: We are, here at Kennedy, we're looking at biological means. The common thread to all the methods that I've talked about is that they involve microorganisms to do the work, to break down the materials. There are other physical chemical approaches that are being evaluated, things like incineration, or I think the other one's called super-critical water oxidation, which are based not on using microorganisms but physical chemical processes to break down this material. And they're all being evaluated, like I said, to see what might be the most efficient.

John: Okay. And we have a picture of actually some potatoes I believe.

Jay: Yeah.

John: Being recycled?

Jay: Well this is a hydroponic potato production. And this picture here is a picture of a normal hydroponic solution. One that you'd make up with chemicals from off the shelf.

This is a traditional hyrdoponic approach where you'd buy your chemicals and-, your fertilizers in essence, and grow the plants on dissolved nutrients that you make up.

Now in the next picture, I think that we have, here is growing potatoes the same way with hydroponically, but using recycled effluent. This is a picture actually of potatoes grown on effluent from that second reactor I showed you, that stirred-tank reactor. So taking that effluent, using the nutrients that are contained in that, as opposed to chemicals off the shelf and growing the plants.

And we've had very good success with that. We've been able to grow potatoes for 400 days without any kind of negative impact of recycling these nutrients.

Now we haven't recycled 100% of the nutrients yet, because this was just the inedible parts of the plant. The nutrients from that. If you're going to have complete closure of the nutrient loops, you have to start processing all the human waste, like human solid material, fecal material, urine, all of those things would have to be recycled if you want to have 100% closure.

John: Okay. That's a pretty good overview of composting and other forms of recycling. Let's go on to-, move from solid waste to what is known as gray water. What exactly is gray water to start off?

Jay: Gray water is defined as. Gray water is defined as non-toilet waste water in your house. So think of it as all the shower water, bath water, dishwash water, clothes wash water, hand wash, all the non-toilet waste. And it is by far the largest waste stream from your house. And just like that, it's projected to be the largest waste stream in any kind of closed habitat in space as well.

John: Do we use gray water to feed the plants in space?

Jay: Well, I think

John: I guess the picture you have there, looks like, that's actually bags of water.

Jay: Right, that are being shown.

John: Being shown. That's probably what would happen if they didn't recycle water. It would be

Jay: Yes, and they have to bring a lot of water up. Because they don't have 100% water recycling on Space Station yet and it's one of the first things they have to recycle is water. Because it's pretty expensive water to launch it up there all the time.

Buy you asked about plants. We do, we're looking at using plants as a way to process gray water, because what we've found is as I mentioned, on that first slide, as plants grow, they release a lot of water from the leaves through a process called transporation. It's a natural process that plants do. And in a closed habitat, the plants transpire the water and you can condense that water out of the air.

So if you can grow the plants on, in essence, dirty water, water from say the shower, then the plants can actually convert that dirty water into clean water. Now the plants are doing the transporation but you're also relying on microorganisms again that are growing on the roof of the plant to break down the organic material that's in the gray water, which is mainly the soap.

Soap technically isn't the correct term, but we'll just use soap. For things that are contained in most of the gray water streams are things you're using to wash your body, wash your dishes, or wash your clothes.

So one of the approaches is to use plants as-, because the plant roots [inaudible] are kind of the bioreactor and the plants transpire. Now you can also use bioreactors, we're also looking at that. Same kind of approach with microorganisms, to breaking it down into some kind of reactor and recycling water that way.

John: We have a good question here from Mary. Will the astronauts be drinking gray water?

Jay: Right now they don't. But if you're going to have this completely closed system, in essence they will drink the gray water, but not directly. They'll drink that water after it's been processed to a certain degree, to remove-, obviously you want to remove things that are going to make the gray water taste bad, and you also want to remove things like bacteria and viruses that may wash off your body that are going to be a health problem as well.

John: Here's a good question. How much water do the astronauts use while taking a shower, compared to here on Earth? Do we have [a shot again] actually.

Jay: Yeah, that shot's actually from, I believe it's from Sky Lab. Yeah, they don't have a shower in place on Space Station right now, but they had one on Sky Lab, the older version of Space Station.

Our estimates for long-term missions is that people would require about 27 liters of water per day, and they produce about 27 liters of gray water per person per day. And that corresponds-, a liter, you know what a liter-, as a scientist, I always think in liters, not gallons. But you know what a liter jar or a liter like coke bottle is. So you get 27 of those per day. So it's quite a bit.

But on Earth, typically, in your house, you probably use four times that, like 100 liters per person per day is a good estimate.

John: That's a lot of water. Nice long hot showers, right?

Jay: Yeah exactly. They won't be-, like no such think in space.

John: Okay. Here's an actual picture of a washer and a shower. Now this in your lab, correct? This is not on Station?

Jay: Right. This is work that we did, we have done over the past several years here, looking at actually trying to collect gray water streams and then process them in various ways, including, I think what we're going to see today is pictures of recycling it into a plant system. So that's the kind of-, there's nothing special about those, that washer-dryer, that shower. They're just ones that we built into our lab so we could have people go in and shower or wash their clothes.

John: And test the gray water?

Jay: And test the gray water, right. And this is, this picture of one of the staff members going in to take a shower.

John: Shows you how really big this thing is.

Jay: Yeah, the washer dryer is kind of the normal apartment combo unit and the shower is just kind of a-, well we made a little bathroom for privacy for people.

John: Okay.

Jay: That picture, we weighed out defined amounts of in this case soap that would be used for washing the clothes. Well we'd give the people a certain amount of soap to wash with and we would kind of control how much it was so we could define the waste stream.

There might be a picture of it, and I took showers as part of the study too.

This soap is a soap that has been approved for use on Space Station. It has a funny name, it's called [Igepon]. But it's not that different than the soap that you would find in a shampoo or a body wash. It's kind of semi-solid. It's kind of like taking a shower with Crisco oil, in texture. But once you put it on your body, it is definitely-, it suds up, it actually works very well.

John: Wow.

Jay: Then to take a shower, we'd press a button and it would-, we'd have a defined amount of water for the shower. I forget exactly how much it was. It didn't sound like much. I think it was six liters or something, six or seven liters.

John: That's not that much.

Jay: Yeah, and it's not that much, but we found that it was plenty to take a shower.

You'd turn it on and you'd get wet first, then you'd lather up and then you'd rinse off. And we always had enough water to do that.

This is a picture of some students that we had. We have students come every summer to work in our lab, college students, these are college undergraduates. And when we first started doing the work, one of the first things we did was have the students wash each other's feet, and then we would collect foot-wash water and grow plants on that. That was like the first step, and then we followed that up with some of the studies I just mentioned where we were all taking full body showers.

John: Okay.

Jay: This is a picture of actually of one the scientists taking the gray water and I think she's adding in chemicals, other chemicals into it to kind of make the nutrient solution for the plants. And I think the next picture shows her actually pouring that material into the plant growth system.

John: Okay, [inaudible] next picture?

Jay: Yeah. There she is. What you're seeing a picture there is the same kind of hydroponic plant growth trays and you see the PVC piping and it's connected down to a pump, and she's just pouring the gray water and the nutrients into that reservoir which then is recirculated through the plants.

John: Do you think they would use the same PVC in space, or that's just for raw

Jay: No, that system is not optimized for space. And again what system you're going to use for space depends on what-, you're going to do it in microgravity, you're not going to have pumps and flowing water like that because this system is all dependent on gravity. So they'd have to have a very different kind of system.

John: Okay, great. Now let's move on. We did talk about long-duration a little bit at the beginning, but let's move on and talk about it a little more. Would conserving water and composting someday actually help us reach other planets such as Mars?

Jay: Yeah, I think that the questions of life support or how you would sustain people in space for long periods of time is as important to an eventual Mars mission or long-duration mission as other kinds of questions like what kind of rockets are you going to use? What kind of engine propulsion? It's as potentially limiting as some of these other questions because of what I was talking about at the beginning, of how much material and mass you have to take with you if you didn't have regenerative systems in place.

And the biggest limitation right now for those kind of systems is how much energy it would take to run them. The plants. To grow plants you need a lot of light energy, so where are you going to get that energy? It's not as simple as just saying you're going to use the sunlight energy on Mars because you're farther away, there's dust storms, there's no atmosphere so there's potentially harmful radiation. So there are a lot of really important questions that need to be addressed and answered before-, important questions related to advanced life support that need to be addressed before a mission like that can occur.

John: Okay. So how long do you think it would take to get to Mars, roughly?

Jay: Well what I've seen as estimates is that they could try to minimize the transit to maybe something as short as six months. But then again, once you get there, you're probably going to be-, different scenarios, you could be there for a very short period of time and return or try to be there for about a year and return.

John: So you'd have to recycle, like store up food in order to make it that long.

Jay: Right, yeah. There are scenarios where maybe you would go to Mars and kind of live off stored food for the transit mission, but if you're going to be there for a long time, part of being there would have to have some kind of plant production unit, food production and then recycling.

John: You would think that would already be there before they got there, correct?

Jay: Yeah, that's also been one

John: Set it up for them, [talkover]

Jay: Send up seeds and kind of have a system that you could turn on and kind of remotely start it so you'd know that it would be there ready for the astronauts.

John: Actually, this is a neat picture we have here. This is projected that this is the living module.

Jay: Well it's one of the modules. I think it was Tammy, someone had a question early on about is there a working model of the CELSS. And this is the closest thing, I mentioned, at JFC. There is, that's one of the modules, you see a person standing next to it, and you get the scale. And this is-, the plan at JFC is to put the other five or six of these modules and within that, put people, one of the models would be for habitat. So you'd have crews of four to six people living inside that and then there would also be a module for plant production, a module for different types of recycling technologies. And you would close that all up and test these concepts for long periods of time.

John: Okay. This shot is a picture of inside a module?

Jay: Yeah, and you can kind of see in that picture how there's multiple modules laying-, they're kind of laid next to each other with a connecting tunnel. And that's some of the hard fitting inside that's going on. And that work's underway and there's hopefully the first tests will begin in that within the next several years.

John: Okay. This is a pretty famous NASA picture.

Jay: Yeah, this is an artist's rendition of one of the crew habitat vehicles you can see in the background. Those two larger units. There's been some designs that kind of look like that and then out front there, are two kind of little greenhouse pods that you can see. Some of the people here are doing work with low-pressure greenhouses. The idea of trying to grow the plants, see how low a pressure you can grow the plants under. Because on Mars there's very low pressure.

So if you could grow the plants under low pressure, you may not need as rigid a structure to make the greenhouses. They might even be inflatable structures which would greatly reduce the mass that you'd have to take with you to set up a greenhouse.

John: Okay. I actually here's a close-up of that

Jay: Yeah. And that's actually lettuce growing inside that dome. There's on the bottom you can see there's a feed line going in. That's where the nutrients would be delivered and that system is, they're using that system, putting that into an overall vacuum chamber which they can bring down to very low pressures and then pump up the pressure inside that to basically see how much they have to put-, how much pressure they have to put in there to see the minimum amount of pressure required to grow the plants.

John: And this would be outside of course?

Jay: Right so the testing that's done on Earth is they put that into a vacuum chamber and suck the chamber down to vacuum, but that chamber is supposed to represent what the conditions would be like on Mars, in terms of pressure.

John: Right. I think we have the next one, our last picture here.

Jay: There is another concept where you-, a little bit larger scale greenhouse where you would have again the same kind of, or crude modules there. But then they'd have this-, maybe again an inflatable structure that would be used to grow the plants. The things up on top of that module are come form of solar collector.

That's a cut-away of that module. It really wouldn't be open, it would be closed, because I think I mentioned earlier, you can't-, you couldn't just grow the plants underneath Mars radiation levels, because there's ultraviolet radiation, other ionizing radiation that would kill the plants if you just had an open greenhouse there.

So in this reverse kind of design, you'd have these collectors collecting solar radiation then piping that, either converting to electrical energy and making light or pumping, kind of light piping it down into the plants.

John: Okay. Before we break for the chat room, I'd like to ask you Jay for a final question. Why is it important for humans to travel to other planets and actually perform experiments in space? What's the major-, the main goal?

Jay: Boy, that's a deep question. There's a lot of answers for that. I think some people…

John: What would your response be?

Jay: Well a lot of people argue that it's part of being human, the pursuit of exploration and pushing ourselves is part of who we are and something that we should continue to do. And I think that's important. I also think that there are a lot of interesting things to be gained by exploring that you don't necessarily realize.

The Apollo missions we went away from the Earth, and one of the important things that I think we gained from sending men to the Moon was the fact that people stood on the moon and looked back at the Earth and saw it as this fragile green ship or blue ball in space, and that changed our view of the world. I think everyone out there that's probably listening to me now, you were all born after 1969, so you don't know a world without that view. You'd see the Earth that way, but we didn't see that way before.

And some of the things that we talked about today, or all the things we've talked about today were about recycling and conserving materials and learning to live in kind of in harmony with our environment because we have to. We can't just use resources up and dispose of them, we have to recycle and utilize everything that-, all the waste that we produce and convert it into something useful.

And I think that perspective is one that we need for space, but we need it for Earth as well.

John: Okay. Well thanks a lot.

Jay: You're welcome.

John: Let's go to the chat room, and our first question is: What cannot be recycled in space? Is there anything that cannot?

Jay: What can't be recycled in space? Well that would probably depend on what method you're using for recycling. There are some materials, let's say plastics, some form of plastics, that couldn't be degraded by microorganisms. So there are some plastics that can be, some are biodegradable, some aren't. But non-biodegradable material couldn't be broken down in a composter or the bioreactors I mentioned. But that material could be broken down or oxidized if you were using an incinerator.

John: Okay there's a question here from-, that we have heard that Tang was developed to cover the taste of recycling urine. Is that true?

Jay: I don't think so. Tang was developed and used as part of the Apollo missions and they didn't do any urine recycling on those missions. So I don't think that's true. Some people may thing Tang tastes like urine, but.

John: I believe that's all the questions for today. So before we end the Webcast, I'd like to make a couple of announcements. Our next Webcast on March 28th at 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern, and also our second announcement is if you would like to build your own bottle, soda bottle bioreactor, please go to the lesson guide page of the recycling main page to get to the link. And also we'll have it on our calendar page as well.

And Jay also will have a link to a forum that Jay will have. He can answer your questions. Just post your questions in the form and he'll be happy to help you out.

Jay: Yeah and that would be both the questions related to different experiments you might want to do with the soda bottle bioreactors as part of your class or individually and then also if you do do some experiments with them and build your own and test something, if you need some help trying to analyze them or good results or methods or things, let me know.

John: Okay, thank you very much Jay for stopping by.

Jay: My pleasure.

John: I'd also like to thank NASA Quest for [meta] biology and Kennedy Space Center as well. But most importantly, I'd like to thank you, the viewer for participating in today's broadcast. Once again, my name is John Rau, have a good day.