Fortean Slips: Outer Space Underwear Overload

Outer Space Underwear Overload

by D. Trull
Enigma Editor
dtrull@parascope.com

For millions of people, especially single males age 18 to 35, the scheduling of laundry day is determined by one overriding factor: the total depletion of clean underwear. This is simply because doing laundry is a horrible task, but dirty underwear is an even more terrifying menace. Now imagine that you're living inside a big orbiting tin can for months at a time, and all you're eating is a bunch of runny, gooey food out of plastic tubes, and you've got no access to a washing machine or All-Temperature Cheer. In space, no one can hear you scream, but a crew of astronauts on a long mission together sure can smell.

This is the unspeakable dilemma facing the American and Russian space programs -- how to cope with astronauts' dirty underwear. Sure, it sounds funny, but this is no trivial matter. Cargo space is utterly at a premium on any spacecraft, making it undesirable to haul around the tons of worn and unwashable undies that accumulate over a months-long mission. Now that the international space station is underway and extended voyages will become more the norm in the future, the problem will only get worse. American astronauts change their underwear daily on shuttle flights, and every three days on space station missions, while Mir cosmonauts have to make each pair last a full week. And for extra-vehicular activity, astronauts wear a special sort of heavy-duty Depend undergarment that lets them go to the bathroom during a spacewalk, whizzing while they work. All that dirty laundry can be deadly dangerous, and not just hygiene-wise.

Remember a while back when that Russian cargo ship crashed into the Mir space station when it was trying to dock, and the whole thing nearly busted wide open? Believe it or not, that snafu was caused by dirty underwear. The Russians later explained that an underestimation of the weight of Mir's laundry bags led to a miscalculation of momentum, and the cargo ship flew out of position. Seriously. I'm crappin' you negative. That's one payload that didn't pay off.

Russian scientists are currently searching for a solution that will keep the astronaut underwear under control. Their goal is to make dirty space drawers disappear, with the aid of a tiny clean-up crew -- namely, scads of hungry bacteria. Researchers at Moscow's Institute for Biological and Medical Problems are trying to cultivate a combination of bacteria that could completely consume soiled underwear made out of cotton and paper, as well as other waste materials. This would eliminate the need for cargo ships to periodically ferry these unmentionables back to Earth. As an extra bonus, the feasting bacteria would generate methane, which could be neatly used as a fuel for space station equipment.

The Russians predict that this system will be "a revolution in the science of biodegradation," but the revolution will be a long time coming. They say it may take ten years to find the mixture of bacteria that has the right stuff. The plan is to have it perfected by 2017, when Russia's space agency has tentatively scheduled a pioneering mission sending cosmonauts to Mars. Hopefully that will also give them time to perfect the sealing mechanism on the disposal unit, because things could get ugly if the underwear-eating bacteria got released into the space station's air supply. Those poor cosmonauts would be stuck right in the middle of Alien meets Outbreak.

Now, you might well be wondering why there should be all this fuss and worry about how to dispose of astronauts' underwear, when they could just chuck their skidmarked space jockeys out the airlock and be done with it. That's a good question, especially since the NASA already uses a toilet system that partially ejects the crew's waste matter into the vacuum of space. In the early days of space flight, American astronauts had to make do (or make pee) with simple plastic bags and bottles with tubes attached. According to Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, Skylab and the space shuttles have all been equipped with futuristic toilets, which conform with an airtight seal against various body regions to facilitate the, uh, offloading procedure. A fan suctions the erstwhile Tang and pureed beef stroganoff down into a special mesh enclosure. After doing his or her duty, the astronaut seals up the toilet and opens a portal that exposes the voided materials to the great void of the cosmos. All the moisture immediately boils away in the vacuum, and the small remaining solids are compacted and stored in the commode.

I don't know why they bother hanging onto the leftovers. There must be some kind of international treaty that prohibits the dumping of astronaut sewage or dirty underwear into outer space. Or maybe it would just be considered impolite. I guess it might get kind of gross up there after a few hundred years of space flights... but still, if I was an astronaut, I'd feel genuinely honored to leave my turds in orbit.

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