How Do Astronauts Shower in Space?

The two things that make showers on Earth delightful are hot water and gravity, but in space, both are in limited supply. Learn how astronauts have made do over the years in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bam Here. The first thing people
usually want to know is how astronauts use the toilet
in space, but really showering is just as hard, if
not harder. I think about your own shower and the
two things that make it so nice plenty of hot

(00:24):
water and gravity. Water is even more of a valuable
commodity in space as it is on Earth, and without
Earth's gravity pulling the water down from the showerhead, along
your soapy self and down the drain, there's just water
and SuDS going everywhere. The gravity on the International Space
Station is about of the gravity on Earth's surface, but

(00:47):
because it's an orbit, the station is in a continual
state of free fall, meaning that astronauts experience a continual
state of weightlessness, also called micro gravity. So engineers have
had to get clever to keep astronauts clean in At
the earliest days of NASA, astronauts on the Gemini and
Apollo missions had very few options. They could take a

(01:10):
sponge bath with a towel, soap and water, but water
was very limited in those tiny capsules. These guys also
didn't really change their clothes. When astronauts returned to the
Earth in the nineteen sixties, they were ripe. When the
space station sky Lab was an orbit, it had a
shower of sorts. Astronauts stepped inside a collapse tube and

(01:32):
strapped their feet in at the bottom, then pulled the
tube up around them and clipped it in at the top.
The top and bottom hardly matter when you're in microgravity.
Did smear liquid soap all over themselves and then rinse
it off with a mere twelve cups or two point
eight liters of pressurized water coming through a hose and
shower head inside the tube. They then had to dry

(01:54):
off with a towel and suction up every single water
droplet so that it wouldn't get into the equipment didn't
short something out. From start to finish, the process took
two hours, so a lot of astronauts skipped it again.
They tended to be a bit ripe on their return,
but they did have more clothing to change into. During

(02:14):
the Space Shuttle era, astronauts used the sponge bath system
just like the Gemini and Apollo cruise did, but the
International Space Station that orbits Earth today has improved the
shower situation. All water is supplied in small pouches, and
any that gets on their skin just kind of sticks
and blobs. So to clean up, astronauts use rinsless soap

(02:36):
and rinsless shampoo plus a little water from a pouch.
They can work in the soap and water with a
towel and also use the towel to help remove the soap, water,
and any grime that they pull away. Any moisture that's
left behind is captured by the Environmental Control and Life
Support System and recycled, and we mean any moisture. The

(02:57):
i s S system reclaims every drop of water from
showering to breathing to peeing, then cleans it and reuses it.
While we're talking about space hygiene, astronauts, Samantha Christopher Retti
shared some secrets about microgravity toothbrushing with CBS News. You've
still got your toothbrush and toothpaste, so you can scrub

(03:18):
your teeth. But then what do you do with a
mouthful of minty foam and no sync for spitting. A
lot of astronauts just swallow the toothpaste, but Christopher Retti
chose to spit it into a towel. She said, It's
not the most elegant thing, but you do what you
have to do. Today's episode was written by Christen hall

(03:42):
Geisler and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this
and lots of other fresh topics, visit how stuff works
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