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Mansu Ramon started working for NASA in 1989 to help design something they'd never done before the

International Space Station

Up to that point, US missions have been short enough that astronauts could take along enough clean air and water to get through the flight

They told us our job was to basically

Design air and water systems for a crew that would stay up to six months up in space in low earth orbit and

That they were gonna recycle water and air. So it was like

This is really funny. We'll see if we can make that work

Once he had moved to the US a couple years earlier from Puerto Rico to get a master's degree in microbial ecology

And now she was the chief microbiologist for life support systems on a space station

Although as it would turn out planning for how the biology of tiny microbes would affect the station

Men choose going to spend a lot of time investigating human biology

For the first time we were gonna be recycling the water for the crew to drink and when I mean recycling

We were gonna be using the urine at that time

We're also looking at the recycling of the shower water and the humidity condensate to return back to the crew for drinking

But the urine was the one that took everybody's breath away like oh my gosh, you know

We're gonna be drinking water recycle from urine. You know, that is pretty nasty

So there's a lot of microbiological implications of a system like that

The first thing they had to figure out was was sort of microbes were going to grow in tanks full of urine and condensed sweat

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