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NASA is touting an advancement that could make life in space more sustainable, even if it might sound kind of gross.

The space agency has announced that astronauts on the International Space Station have been able to -for the first time- “recover” 98% of the water that crews bring along on their journey.

Yes, that includes a lot of urine.

NASA says each crew member needs about a gallon of water per day for drinking, food preparation and hygiene. It has been testing new systems to collect and distill drinkable water through a combination of hardware and processes but had only been able to recover 93 to 94% until now.

Thanks to a new Brine Processor Assembly (BPA) designed to extract the remaining wastewater, NASA says scientists were able to reach their 98% goal.

“This is a very important step forward in the evolution of life support systems,” said Christopher Brown at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “Let’s say you collect 100 pounds of water on the station. You lose two pounds of that and the other 98% just keeps going around and around. Keeping that running is a pretty awesome achievement.”

NASA Brine Processor
ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Matthias Maurer changes out the bladder in the space station’s Brine Processor Assembly. (NASA)

The BPA takes urine brine produced through a recovery system, runs it through a special membrane, and then blows warm, dry air over the brine to evaporate the water, NASA said.

The process creates humid air, which, like the crew’s breath and sweat, is collected by the station’s moisture recovery systems.

NASA acknowledges that the idea of drinking processed urine might be unpleasant. But the final product, experts say, is actually cleaner than the water most of us drink here on Earth.

“The processing is fundamentally similar to some terrestrial water distribution systems, just done in microgravity,” said Jill Williamson, NASA’s water subsystems manager. “The crew is not drinking urine; they are drinking water that has been reclaimed, filtered, and cleaned.”

So why is 98% an important goal?

Williamson says each percent, or drop, of water is critical if you want to send humans beyond low Earth orbit and potentially farther into the cosmos.

“The inability of resupply during exploration means we need to be able to reclaim all the resources the crew needs on these missions,” she said. “The less water and oxygen we have to ship up, the more science that can be added to the launch vehicle.”