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STS-126: The programs

In advance of shuttle Endeavour's STS-126 mission to the station, managers from both programs discuss the flight.

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STS-126: The mission

A detailed preview of Endeavour's mission to deliver expanded crew accommodations to the station is provided in this briefing.

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STS-126: Spacewalks

Four spacewalks are planned during Endeavour's STS-126 mission to the station.

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STS-126: The Crew

The Endeavour astronauts, led by commander Chris Ferguson, meet the press in the traditional pre-flight news conference.

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Shuttle rollaround

Space shuttle Endeavour switched launch pads on Oct. 23, traveling from pad 39B to pad 39A.

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Two shuttles sighted

Stunning aerial views of shuttles Atlantis and Endeavour perched atop launch pads 39A and 39B on Sept. 20.

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Endeavour to the VAB

For its role as a rescue craft during the Hubble servicing mission and the scheduled November logistics run to the space station, Endeavour is moved to the Vehicle Assembly Building.

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The 'yuck factor' revisited
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: November 13, 2008

Servicing the starboard SARJ mechanism is a major undertaking. So is installing, hooking up and testing the station's new water recycling gear, toilet and galley, complete with the crew's first refrigerator/freezer for food and drink. The goal is to equip the station with the necessary closed-loop recycling system to permit the lab's full-time crew to expand from three to six next May.

Endeavour's crew will deliver two 1,700-pound water recycling system racks designed to convert urine and condensate into potable water. The racks, packed with complex, interconnected hardware, will be installed in Destiny and connected to the lab's as yet unused potable water buss. The new toilet also will be installed in Destiny, fitting in place like a standard laboratory rack. Unlike a normal rack, however, a privacy enclosure with a folding door will extend out into the center of the lab.

The goal is to process urine right away and to produce water samples that can come back to Earth aboard Endeavour for detailed analysis and a quick-look indication of how the system is operating. To kick start the system, the station crew has stored urine in five Russian containers that will be connected to the recycling gear as soon as possible.

Assuming no major problems develop, the first water sample will be collected while the fourth spacewalk is underway.

"The key to the urine processing uses the age old practice of distillation," Pettit explained before launch. "This is a vacuum distillation apparatus, which will put a partial vacuum on urine concentrate and it will allow the water to boil off at a lower temperature than if you just cooked it under the standard atmosphere of space station. And so the water that comes off from this distillation outfit is going to be pretty pure.

"But any distillation process has a little bit of carry over. It's kind of like the backwash when you drink in your water bottle. And so, to get rid of this little bit of backwash, we run it through a catalytic converter, which will oxidize any of the backwash. The catalytic converter actually has a supply of oxygen running into it to provide an oxidation material to go with the catalyst to convert the backwash, so to speak. And then from there, it goes into a series of ion exchange beds.

"At that point, it's almost like deionized water," Pettit said. "It also goes through a charcoal bed that gets rid of a few other impurities and then it finally gets analyzed by a couple of on-line boxes. One of them just checks the bulk resistivity and if that doesn't satisfy the box, it opens up a valve and sends that splash of water back to go again. It's kind of like a Monopoly game where you don't get to go by go and get $200. You just go straight back to the distillation unit.

"And then, from there it goes through this TOCA machine, this Total Organic Carbon Analyzer. Organic carbon is the kind of stuff you don't want. If the feed stock is urine and you're having potable water come out, you don't want organic carbon in there. So, the total Organic Carbon Analyzer lets you know whether any of that stuff has come through. And then from there, it can branch out into the oxygen generator or go to the galley. In the galley, they add some salts just to make the water taste a little bit better. if you drink distilled water, it doesn't taste as good as regular water and there's a few mineral salts in there that for some reason or another makes it more palatable to human beings.

"From there, we can use it to make our dinner or our coffee with," Pettit said. "I like to refer to this whole process as a coffee machine. Because it's going to take yesterday's coffee and make it into today's coffee."

But no one will actually drink water from the new system until at least three months of testing and analysis. The Total Organic Carbon Analyzer will take samples periodically and additional samples will be returned to Earth during the next shuttle mission in February. Assuming everything checks out, NASA will press ahead with plans to boost the station's crew size to six with the launch of a Soyuz spacecraft next May 25.

"There's two water racks and the toilet rack," Magnus said. "All three of those are going to get put in the U.S. laboratory. There's some plumbing already in the laboratory that will accommodate some of these connections between the racks. Just between water rack No. 1 and water rack No. 2 ... there are several back-and-forth lines, if you will, where the water goes through different parts of the process. So all of that has to be hooked up and then that has to get connected to the water bus that goes to the toilet so the urine can come into the water rack and start the reclamation process.

"Of course, you test the stuff on the ground as much as you can and you hope that once you get to orbit it works the way you expected it to. But if it doesn't, (we'll) start working on ways to fix it. So that's the first concern, getting it all hooked up, making sure it all physically goes together. And then they requested that two of us use the new toilet right from the get go so they can start getting urine into the system to start the process. We're hoping to at least get the physical connections done, the activations done during the shuttle flight."

Once processing begins, water samples will be collected every four days. Some of those will be analyzed in orbit and other will be set aside for return to Earth.

The toilet will be installed in Destiny just forward of the crew's ergometer exercise bike.

"It's on the port side," Magnus said. "It goes up looking like a regular rack and then there's sort of a fold-out compartment that will extend into the aisle of the laboratory, I don't want to say half way but substantially, so it sticks out into the aisle quite a bit, and that's the hygiene compartment and toilet sort of combined together. So it'll be a major obstruction in the laboratory when it's assembled."

As for privacy, Magnus said "it'll be sufficient, it'll be private enough. It is unfortunate that it's right there, though, in the lab, because it's right down our hallway, our main passageway. But the privacy will be sufficient, I have no worries on that score."

The toilet will not be hooked up and actually used until after Endeavour departs. Engineers want the next shuttle crew to use the new potty to simulate the sort of conditions that can be expected when a six-person crew is on board full time.

In the meantime, "we're going to start with five containers of waste water from the Russian toilet that we're going to be attaching into the potable bus system to start the regeneration system going," Magnus said.

"We'll be taking samples from that system periodically where we're going to attach the Total Organic Carbon Analyzer, the TOCA, this flight and that's a way to do analysis on orbit of the quality of the water. We'll also connect up the potable water dispenser, which is part of the galley that we'll have up on station. Once all these systems are connected, we'll be regularly doing water samples. We'll try really hard to get a water sample down on this mission from the TOCA and from the water regeneration system itself so they can be compared on the ground.

"A lot of the other samples that will be taken periodically over the next four months will come down on (the next shuttle mission in February). And then once the ground has been able to do the analysis and make sure the water is the quality they expect, then we'll be given the go to actually drink it. But during our mission, mainly we'll be doing the sampling. We'll be running a lot of those samples through the analyzer on board at the same time we're taking the samples from the regeneration system so we can analyze how well the TOCA is performing. So there will be a lot of water work on this mission."

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Additional coverage for subscribers:
VIDEO: THURSDAY'S COUNTDOWN STATUS AND WEATHER UPDATE PLAY
VIDEO: WEDNESDAY'S PRE-LAUNCH NEWS CONFERENCE PLAY
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR ASTRONAUTS ARRIVE FOR LAUNCH PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: TUESDAY'S COUNTDOWN STATUS AND WEATHER UPDATE PLAY

VIDEO: STATION ASTRONAUTS PREPARE FOR SHUTTLE ARRIVAL PLAY
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR'S PAYLOADS READIED FOR TREK TO SPACE PLAY

VIDEO: UPDATE ON SHUTTLE AND STATION PROGRAMS PLAY
VIDEO: STS-126 MISSION OVERVIEW PLAY
VIDEO: PREVIEW BRIEFING ON MISSION'S SPACEWALKS PLAY
VIDEO: THE ASTRONAUTS' PRE-FLIGHT NEWS BRIEFING PLAY

VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH COMMANDER CHRIS FERGUSON PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH PILOT ERIC BOE PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH MS1 HEIDEMARIE PIPER PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH MS2 STEPHEN BOWEN PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH MS3 DON PETITT PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH MS4 SHANE KIMBROUGH PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH MS5 SANDY MAGNUS PLAY

VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH SPACE STATION'S EXPEDITION 17 CREW PLAY

VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR COMMANDER AND PILOT PRACTICE LANDINGS PLAY

VIDEO: ISS PROGRAM MANAGER UPDATES SOYUZ INVESTIGATION PLAY
VIDEO: ISS PROGRAM MANAGER DESCRIBES SARJ REPAIR PLAN PLAY
VIDEO: ISS PROGRAM MANAGER DISCUSSES RADIATOR DAMAGE PLAY
VIDEO: EXPEDITION 18 PRE-FLIGHT MISSION BRIEFING PLAY

VIDEO: AERIAL VIEWS OF ATLANTIS AND ENDEAVOUR PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR AT SUNRISE ON LAUNCH PAD 39B PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: AERIAL VIEWS OF ENDEAVOUR AFTER ROLLOUT PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR ROLLS FROM VAB TO LAUNCH PAD PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: TIME-LAPSE MOVIE OF ARRIVAL AT PAD 39B PLAY
VIDEO: TIME-LAPSE MOVIE OF ENDEAVOUR LEAVING VAB PLAY

VIDEO: SHUTTLE HOISTED FOR ATTACHMENT TO TANK PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR'S DEPARTURE FROM HANGAR PLAY | HI-DEF

VIDEO: TIME-LAPSE MOVIE OF ENDEAVOUR GOING VERTICAL PLAY
VIDEO: TIME-LAPSE MOVIE OF BEING HOISTED OFF TRANSPORTER PLAY
VIDEO: TIME-LAPSE MOVIE OF ENDEAVOUR MOVING TO VAB PLAY
MORE: STS-126 VIDEO COVERAGE
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