Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bam Here. The first thing people usually want to know is how astronauts use the toilet in space, but really showering is just as hard, if not harder. I think about your own shower and the two things that make it so nice plenty of hot
water and gravity. Water is even more of a valuable commodity in space as it is on Earth, and without Earth's gravity pulling the water down from the showerhead, along your soapy self and down the drain, there's just water and SuDS going everywhere. The gravity on the International Space Station is about of the gravity on Earth's surface, but because it's an orbit, the station is in a continual state of free fall, meaning that astronauts experience a continual
state of weightlessness, also called micro gravity. So engineers have had to get clever to keep astronauts clean in At the earliest days of NASA, astronauts on the Gemini and Apollo missions had very few options. They could take a sponge bath with a towel, soap and water, but water was very limited in those tiny capsules. These guys also didn't really change their clothes. When astronauts returned to the
Earth in the nineteen sixties, they were ripe. When the space station sky Lab was an orbit, it had a shower of sorts. Astronauts stepped inside a collapse tube and strapped their feet in at the bottom, then pulled the tube up around them and clipped it in at the top. The top and bottom hardly matter when you're in microgravity. Did smear liquid soap all over themselves and then rinse it off with a mere twelve cups or two point eight liters of pressurized water coming through a hose and
shower head inside the tube. They then had to dry off with a towel and suction up every single water droplet so that it wouldn't get into the equipment didn't short something out. From start to finish, the process took two hours, so a lot of astronauts skipped it again. They tended to be a bit ripe on their return,
but they did have more clothing to change into. During the Space Shuttle era, astronauts used the sponge bath system just like the Gemini and Apollo cruise did, but the International Space Station that orbits Earth today has improved the shower situation. All water is supplied in small pouches, and any that gets on their skin just kind of sticks and blobs. So to clean up, astronauts use rinsless soap and rinsless shampoo plus a little water from a pouch.
They can work in the soap and water with a towel and also use the towel to help remove the soap, water, and any grime that they pull away. Any moisture that's left behind is captured by the Environmental Control and Life Support System and recycled, and we mean any moisture. The i s S system reclaims every drop of water from showering to breathing to peeing, then cleans it and reuses it. While we're talking about space hygiene, astronauts, Samantha Christopher Retti
shared some secrets about microgravity toothbrushing with CBS News. You've still got your toothbrush and toothpaste, so you can scrub your teeth. But then what do you do with a mouthful of minty foam and no sync for spitting. A lot of astronauts just swallow the toothpaste, but Christopher Retti chose to spit it into a towel. She said, It's not the most elegant thing, but you do what you have to do. Today's episode was written by Christen hall
Geisler and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other fresh topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.