Washing clothes and bed linen (or sleeping bags) removes bacteria and fungal infestations. Hannah takes a shower.
Water is a valuable commodity on the Space Station. We have to recycle it, because we cannot just tap into the water main! That means that we have to clean the dirty water from the showers, the clothes washing, the dish-washingand even the toilets. We then recycle it, and use it again. Have
you wondered how we do that? Visit Life
Support to find out. The
recycling process has to remove all the solid,
floating matter in the water and all the dissolved chemicals that otherwise
might harm us. These personal lockers aboard the space shuttle enable crew members to store their toiletries. © NASA, 1997
There is a small bathroom unit in the habitat modules. When you use this you have to close and lock the door before any systems work. The door has an airlock seal. This is so any free water droplets are not released into the main Space Station. The unit is ventilated to draw any stray droplets and vapor into the recycling system.We bathe by taking a shower in a completely sealed booth. This has foot stirrups on the floor and hand rails on the wall to stop yourself drifting away in microgravity. High-power water sprays direct warm water on to you from several directions. In microgravity the water would float normally, and a person could easilydrown in the shower, so there is an air suction at the floor and a blowing system at the ceiling to force used water droplets out of the shower unit. Waste water is processed directly by the water recycling system, and in fact the shower is important in providing dilution for solid waste chemical concentrates. We
use soap and shampoo in shower in the same way as on Earth, but this is
specially formulated to be compatible with
Each crew member can have a maximum of two showers per day. We are each supplied with personal hygiene packs which contain all the necessary toiletries we need.We carry a large stock of these and we cancollect a new one from our stores each week. Toothbrushes and toothpaste are provided and these are the same as you would use in your bathroom. Any shaving has to be done in the shower, so that no minute hair particles are left drifting through the Space Station. The
shower unit is supposed to be self-cleaning. It runs through a special
cleaning cycle after it has been used.
However,
I have recently found signs of mold growth around the foot stirrups. Clean
it herself
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