A new spacesuit design can recycle astronauts’ urine into purified, drinkable water

The life of an astronaut may sound like a glamorous career but it requires a lot of hard work and sacrifice. They have to spend weeks or even months at a time away from Earth, their loved ones and the warm embrace of gravity. They have to endure an endless stream of “Tang” jokes. Sometimes they even have to drink recycled wastewater.

We say “sometimes” because not every drop of astronaut urine is recycled into palatable water. The urine they expel into their spacesuits is simply flushed away or discarded when they return to the spacecraft. A new space suit designed by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell University inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune novels could make spacewalks longer and less disgusting by recycling their expelled urine in a special filtration backpack. The research and design teams from both schools published a paper of their findings in the scientific journal Frontiers.

These suits are referred to as “stillsuits” in the Dune universe and can capture moisture to recycle it into drinkable water as soldiers trek and battle across the barren desert world of Arrakis. The real-life, proposed stillsuits do roughly the same thing. The new stillsuits have a “vacuum-based external catheter leading to a combined forward-reverse osmosis unit” that astronauts carry on their back, says the study’s lead author and research staff member Sofia Etlin in a press release.

The suits were designed with future NASA space missions in mind including the Artemis II and Artemis III missions that will orbit the moon and touch down on its south pole in the next two years. NASA and Axiom Space have already approved a spacesuit design for its moon missions but it looks like this new filtration system could be added to them. The stillsuits can also be used for the manned Mars space mission in the early 2030s.

The stillsuits will not only quench the astronauts’ thirst during spacewalks but it will also make them more hygienic. The traditional NASA spacesuit design that’s been in circulation since the 1970s only comes with a superabsorbent polymer to catch astronauts’ urine. That means pretty much every astronaut who’s gone on a space or moon walk has peed in their space pants.

This outdated waste system has also led to hygiene and medical issues for astronauts like urinary tract infections (UTIs) and gastrointestinal problems. That’s why you’ve never seen Paul Atreides struggling with diverticulitis.

NASA hasn’t officially adopted Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell University’s new spacesuit design for any of its upcoming space missions. We imagine that we’d urge NASA to fasttrack it if we had been on the International Space Station and ever had to endure a long spacewalk after drinking too much Tang.