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As the ever-growing mountain of garbage poses more and more challenges on Earth, there is a similar problem in space, where NASA must find innovative ways to manage waste in the world. deep space missions. Aboard the International Space Station requires extreme measures of efficiency to conserve resources, reduce waste, reuse materials and recycle water and breathable air.
Regular cargo replenishment missions provide about 12 metric tons per year. Challenges accumulated on board the laboratory in orbit
When garbage accumulates, astronauts manually squeeze it into garbage bags, temporarily store about two tons for relatively short periods of time, and then send them to a vehicle. Commercial supply that returns them to Earth or incinerates when re-entering the atmosphere.
The future spacecraft, much farther from Earth, does NASA turn to the US industry to advance the concepts of compaction and waste treatment.
The agency issued a call for prototypes and, ultimately, flying demonstrations to steal the space station.
The storage of waste inside a spaceship not only consumes a valuable volume, but can also create physical and biological hazards to the crew. Storage also removes the ability to extract remaining resources that could be recycled or reused.
The call for proposals seeks solutions that compact waste, eliminate biological and physical safety issues and recover resources trapped for potential reuse or reuse. should not leave ground zero, however. NASA has been developing waste management systems since the 1980s, including recent developments such as the Heat Melt Compactor and "trash to gas" technologies.
The development will be in two phases. In Phase A, selected companies will develop a compaction and waste management system concept, conduct design reviews with NASA, and validate concepts using prototype ground demonstrations. Throughout this phase, companies may request the use of NASA facilities to perform subsystem tests. In phase B, a flight unit will be developed to demonstrate a system aboard the space station as early as 2022.
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