A different kind of recycling

It’s one of the great stranded-on-an-island questions that inevitably comes up at a bar — would you drink your own pee to survive? You might say no at first, but when presented with a series of qualifying factors — there is no other water available or your shipwrecked mates have island fever and are holding a cutlass to your head — you inevitably crack and agree that you would in fact recycle your own urine.

This might make for funny barroom jokes, but there are three guys who wouldn’t be laughing. And they might still be in orbit. On May 20, three astronauts aboard the International Space Station were the first to test a system designed to recycle urine into potable drinking water for space missions. If you want to see the video evidence for yourself, the action begins at the 6:19 mark.