Houston, we have a podcast.

Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 105, Recycling

Water and Air.

I'm Gary Jordan and I'll be your host today.

On this podcast we bring in the experts, NASA scientists, engineers, astronauts,

all to let you know the coolest information about what's going on right here at NASA.

So a while back in February, we spoke to John Lewis, the manager of the Orion Environmental Control and Life Support Systems.

And we talked about how Orion is specifically designed to provide a livable, reliable environment

for travel through a harsh deep space environment.

Well a little closer to home, the International Space Station relies on these systems,

which we call ECLS systems, and you'll hear that a lot during this episode.

These systems sustain a livable environment for crew members staying in low-Earth orbit for a long period of time.

There's a lot of elements that go into an equal system.

The parts of the space station where astronauts live have an atmospheric pressure of 14.7

PSI, about the same as Earth at sea level for the crew, but also then for sensitive equipment stored on the station.

It's a mixed air environment of nitrogen and oxygen, again, like on Earth.

And there are systems for scrubbing every exhale of CO2

and replacing it with more breathable oxygen, which is very important.

There's also some systems that pull in water from every available source, urine, sweat, even

just humidity or in astronaut's breath, and then it recycles it into potable

or drinkable water. We're reclaiming 90% of the water used at this point.

This is another system for splitting water into breathable air and another for turning air into water.

...