The International Space Station has been in continuous crewed operation since November 2000, which means somebody has been living roughly four hundred kilometres above the surface of the Earth every single day for the past twenty-five years without a break. During that time the station has been visited by more than two hundred and eighty astronauts and cosmonauts from more than twenty countries, and each of them has faced the same practical problem that any long-term resident of anywhere eventually has to solve.

Their clothes get dirty. And the space station, for reasons that come down to the physics of orbital resupply, does not have and has never had a washing machine on board. What NASA and the Russian space agency have therefore developed over the intervening decades is one of the more counterintuitive laundry solutions in any modern human institution. There is no laundry. The clothes go into a cargo capsule when the astronauts are done with them. The cargo capsule burns up on the way home.

Why nobody bothered to send a washing machine up

The reason is water. Aboard the space station every drop of water is a precious resource that either has to be lifted up from Earth at roughly $10,000 per kilogram in launch costs, or has to be extracted and recycled from the crew’s own urine, sweat and exhaled breath through a purification system that operates continuously in the background of station life. The station recycles roughly 90 per cent of the water it produces internally, which is considerably better than any comparable industrial recycling system on Earth. But even at that recycling rate, adding a washing machine to the water demand of the station would consume enough additional water per cycle to fundamentally change the economics of resupply. According to a 2017 VICE interview with Robert Trevino, a senior engineer with NASA’s Crew and Thermal Systems Division who is responsible for astronaut clothing on the station, the engineering team has been examining this question for years. NASA’s own internal trade studies compared the water and power requirements of a hypothetical station laundry system against the cost of simply replacing dirty clothes with fresh ones sent up on cargo runs. Replacing the clothes turned out to be cheaper. So that is what NASA does.

If space exploration fascinates you, you’ll enjoy this video we made on why astronauts come home feeling like they’re being watched…

What this means in practical terms is that astronauts on the station wear each piece of clothing for as long as it can reasonably be worn before it becomes unusable. Exercise clothes get roughly two weeks of use because the mandatory hour of daily exercise required to prevent bone and muscle loss in microgravity produces enough sweat to defeat the antibacterial coating on the fabric within a fortnight. Regular daily-wear clothes, meaning the cotton polos and cargo shorts that most station astronauts prefer, get anywhere between one and three months of wear per garment. Underwear rotation is up to the individual crew member. Trevino told VICE that former astronaut Don Pettit was known to have worn the same pair of shorts for months at a stretch, which was apparently a source of considerable amusement among his crewmates. The clothing is sourced by NASA’s contractor Lockheed Martin from ordinary commercial suppliers, including Lands’ End, Cabela’s, and Blackhawk. There is nothing technologically special about the fabric.

Where the clothes actually end up

Once a garment has reached the end of its useful wearing life, it goes into the station’s waste system alongside the packaging, food waste, expired equipment, and general trash that the crew generates every day. The waste is bagged, taped, and stored in whichever visiting cargo vehicle happens to be docked at the time. There are currently three different cargo vehicles that regularly deliver supplies to the station. Russia’s Progress capsule and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus vehicle are both single-use, meaning they are launched from Earth full of supplies, unloaded at the station, refilled with trash, undocked, and then 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. It is reusable, and it returns to Earth intact via parachute for a splashdown in the Pacific and eventual reuse on a subsequent mission. So while Dragon comes home in one piece, the trash from every Progress and Cygnus run ends up as a spectacular fireball crossing the sky somewhere in the upper atmosphere above the South Pacific.

According to Space.com’s November 2023 reporting by managing editor Brett Tingley on the reentry of the Russian Progress MS-23 cargo spacecraft, the reentry of a fully loaded trash-carrying capsule is a visually striking event. The Progress MS-23 undocked from the station on 29 November 2023 carrying, in the words of the Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko who saw it off, “old equipment and household waste, or everything the experts have decided to toss from the station.” Four hours later NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, who had been alerted by mission control to look out of a specific window at a specific time, was able to photograph the reentry from the ISS itself. Her photographs show what looks like a spectacular meteor. Bright trails of fire streak across the darkness of the upper atmosphere. The main capsule breaks apart into several distinct fragments as the atmospheric heating destroys its structural integrity. Then everything disperses into smaller and smaller sparks until nothing recognisable is left. Moghbeli wrote on X afterwards that the whole event lasted only two or three minutes and reminded her of fireworks.

What was inside the capsule during those two or three minutes was, among many other things, the accumulated clothing that seven astronauts and cosmonauts on the station had been wearing over the preceding several months. Somewhere in the fireball was Kononenko’s old exercise gear, along with the daily-wear cotton polos of the American, Japanese, and Danish crew members who had been aboard during the same period. Whether any of the specific garments in question had been observed by anyone on the ground as bright flashes in the night sky is impossible to say with certainty. But the fireball that briefly crossed the upper atmosphere above the South Pacific on the evening of 29 November 2023 did in fact contain, among its many other contents, the discarded underwear of at least seven people who had been living in low Earth orbit at the time.

Which is to say that the surprising claim in the title turns out to be more or less exactly what actually happens. The station has no washing machine. The clothes get worn until they can’t be worn any longer. They get packed into whichever cargo vehicle is next scheduled to depart. And the cargo vehicle, on its final trajectory back through the upper atmosphere, becomes a briefly visible streak of light in the night sky before the whole thing burns away to nothing over the Pacific Ocean. If you happen to be looking up at the right moment from the right latitude, and if you know the timing of the current Progress or Cygnus deorbit schedule, you might catch one. And what you would be watching, in the strict literal sense, is somebody’s old socks and shirts on their final journey home.

The post Astronauts on the space station have no washing machine, because water is far too precious to waste on laundry, so they wear the same clothes for days and then pack the dirty ones into a cargo capsule that burns up on reentry, which means a fireball crossing the sky could, in theory, be a bundle of an astronaut’s old underwear. appeared first on Space Daily.

The Apollo 11 mission cost NASA more than twenty billion dollars in 1969 money, or somewhere north of one hundred and fifty billion dollars in modern terms. It was one of the most expensive single scientific undertakings in human history, involving roughly four hundred thousand people across NASA and its contractor network. Everything about it was unprecedented. The Saturn V rocket had never been flown with a crew on a full lunar trajectory before. The Lunar Module had never been landed on a celestial body. The re-entry profile at the return end of the trip had never been survived. Buzz Aldrin flew on the mission as the second of three crew members and walked on the lunar surface on 20 July 1969. He returned home four days later. And when he got back to Houston he filed a routine federal government travel expense claim like any other public employee returning from a work trip. It was for thirty-three dollars and thirty-one cents.

What the voucher actually itemises

Aldrin posted a photograph of the original voucher on Twitter on 30 July 2015 to mark the forty-sixth anniversary of the moon landing. According to CBS News reporting the following day by science journalist Amanda Schupak, the voucher covers the period from 7 July 1969 through to 27 July 1969, which is a week and a half before the launch through to three days after the splashdown. What follows is probably the strangest business trip itinerary in the history of American federal expense accounting. The listed points of travel are Houston, Texas to Cape Kennedy, Florida on 7 July, then Cape Kennedy to Moon on 16 July, then Moon to Pacific Ocean on 24 July, then Pacific Ocean to Hawaii the same day, and finally Hawaii back to Houston on 27 July. The mode of transport listed for each leg is equally striking. Government Air for the two flights inside the continental United States. Government Spacecraft for the leg between Cape Kennedy and the Moon. USS Hornet, which is the aircraft carrier that recovered the crew, for the leg between the Pacific Ocean and Hawaii. And a US Air Force plane for the return to Houston.

The life of an astronaut is truly fascinating – check out the video we made on what every astronaut sees in the mirror:

The federal expense reimbursement system in 1969 did not distinguish between astronauts and any other government employee. If you were travelling on official business you filled out the same form, listed the same route, claimed the same mileage rate for personal vehicle use, and provided the same receipts for any out-of-pocket costs. Aldrin’s voucher was processed by a routine NASA finance office alongside vouchers from technicians attending conferences and administrators travelling to Washington. Nobody appears to have thought the situation odd enough to route it through any special channel. The reimbursement was paid in the normal course of business a few weeks later.

Why the amount was so small

The reason the total came to only thirty-three dollars and thirty-one cents rather than something more substantial is spelled out on the voucher itself. According to BBC Science Focus Magazine’s August 2015 write-up by Rachel Baxter, the document states in plain text that government meals and quarters were furnished for all the dates in question. That covered his food and lodging at the pre-launch quarantine facility at Cape Kennedy, aboard the Saturn V and the Apollo capsule, on the lunar surface itself, aboard the USS Hornet during the post-splashdown recovery, and inside the mobile quarantine facility where he and Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins were confined for twenty-one days after their return in case they had brought back any unknown lunar pathogens. The federal government had covered every one of those things directly, so Aldrin had nothing to claim against any of them.

What the thirty-three dollars and thirty-one cents actually covered was almost certainly the mileage rate for driving his own personal vehicle from his home in Houston to Ellington Air Force Base and back at each end of the trip. Government employees in 1969 were entitled to claim a per-mile rate when using their own car for official business. Aldrin did what everybody at NASA did. He drove to the airfield, got on the government plane, and came home the same way at the end. He submitted his mileage on the standard form. He got his check for thirty-three dollars and thirty-one cents in the mail a few weeks later.

The voucher was not the only piece of Apollo 11 bureaucratic paperwork Aldrin dug out and shared publicly in 2015. He also posted the US Customs declaration that he and Armstrong and Collins had signed on landing in Honolulu after the recovery. The declaration listed their country of departure as Moon and their flight number as Apollo 11. The cargo section listed moon rock and moon dust samples. The question about whether any crew member had been in contact with an infectious disease during the trip was answered by Aldrin in the space provided as “moon disease TBD.” A Honolulu customs inspector had counter-signed the form and accepted it as filed. The crew had cleared customs.

What the whole set of documents represents is one of the more revealing curiosities of the entire Apollo programme. NASA had achieved something in July 1969 that no human institution had ever previously come close to achieving, and the federal bureaucracy processing the paperwork for the people who had done it treated them exactly like every other federal employee returning from a work trip. That was partly because the routine forms were the only ones available. But it was also because the people at NASA didn’t consider themselves exempt from the ordinary paperwork obligations of federal employment. Aldrin filled out his expense form. He submitted his customs declaration. He collected his thirty-three dollars and thirty-one cents. And forty-six years later he still had the voucher in a drawer.

The post The second man to walk on the Moon later dug out his old expense claim from the trip, and it turns out Buzz Aldrin was reimbursed the grand sum of 33 dollars and 31 cents, not for the rocket or the spacecraft, but for the ordinary travel expenses of getting himself to and from the launch site like any other business trip. appeared first on Space Daily.