Alabama NASA engineers tapped to settle international crisis with Russia

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — NASA and Russia are disagreeing on how to properly filter astronaut waste, and Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center is right in the middle of the mess.

Water filtration systems are a vital aspect of manned space journeys. Layne Carter, the water subsystem manager for the International Space Station (ISS) at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center said, “There’s always an adventure right around the corner with the water system.”

With two failed attempts to reach outer space within the past year, the U.S. lost significant cargo, including multi-filtration beds for the U.S. water processor on the ISS. The loss of the filtration systems resulted in limitations of what could be processed, and forced the U.S. to come up with back up plans for the water system.

However, one back up plan that the U.S. could not utilize was using Russia’s water system on the ISS. While Russia also has a water filtration system on ISS, the U.S. does and cannot use it. Instead, both the United States and Russia have developed their own respective water systems. Both systems include filters for the urine-processing system, which recycles astronauts’ waste into a drinking supply. Yet the two countries disagreed at the onset of their systems’ creation of the most effective way to purify their water. The most significant difference in the systems is that the American system uses iodine for bacteria control, while the Russian water uses silver, and the two cannot be used interchangeably.

Carter, who has been with NASA for 27 years, said that it makes sense “to have dissimilar redundancies in the space station in case one of the systems has problems.” However, when it comes to the United States and Russia, water filtration systems seems just another source of conflict.

The station has approximately 2,000 liters of water in reserve to be split between the U.S. and the Russian sections of the ISS in case of emergencies. NASA has decided to switch to silver-ionized water on future missions, but for now, the systems from the U.S. and Russia will agree to disagree.

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