International Space Station astronauts indulging in urine-drinking party tonight

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You wouldn’t think people would ever be pleased to hear they can start drinking their own urine – but the astronauts on the International Space Station are currently over the moon about it.

“There will be dancing later,” Mission Control said, after ISS commander Mike Fincke told Earth that the the orbiting station’s faulty urine processor – which filter space wee, condensation and SWEAT and turns it into lovely drinking water – was finally fixed.

This raises two important questions – how do you dance in zero gravity? And before…

International Space Station flushes rubbish down the world's toilet

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Floating miles above the Earth in the International Space Station must really put things into perspective. The world is such a small, fragile place compared to the rest of the universe – from above, all conflicts must seem pointless, and it must be pretty clear that humanity must put aside its differences in order to ensure the survival of this small blue and green marble.

Or at least, that’s what I thought it must be like until I learnt that astronauts are as bad as the rest of us. Apparently they dump their rubbish without a care into the unsuspecting environment too. Yesterday, a “refrigerator sized” Ammonia tank, which was thrown overboard from the ISS in July 2007 landed in the Tasman sea, to which a NASA spokesman responded by rubbing his hands together and saying “It’s Australia’s problem now”, before walking away nonchalantly.

"Norton, we have a problem": Virus on-board the ISS

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The following is probably quite a scary sentence if you’re several miles up and outside the Earth’s atmosphere: “A computer virus has made it’s way on to the International Space Station”. That’s right – up in space, where no one can hear you scream and where there are no rescue missions, there’s a virus threatening to wreak havoc…