Or we’re not going to have enough clothes to exercise and work out in and do our jobs."Įnter: Tide and its parent company Procter and Gamble (P&G). It’s a must-have for the future of exploration. Washing clothes would seem mundane, but it’s life. "And I think that’s critical for exploration. We’ll have to reuse everything," Melvin tells Neel V. "When we’re finally going on future lunar or Martian missions, or one day when we’re even further out, we won’t be able to throw anything away.
On longer missions, such as a trip to Mars with an expected three-year transit time, those hundreds of pounds of clean clothes come at the cost of scientific equipment or life sustaining air and water. They’re so stiff from all that sweat.”Įvery crewed space mission must pack roughly 150 pounds of clothing per person per year, according to the AP. “After that, they’re deemed toxic,” Melvin tells the AP.
Leland Melvin, a former NASA astronaut and NFL player, tells the AP that this schedule has each astronaut throwing out their t-shirt, shorts and socks at the end of every week. What’s more, clothes get gross pretty quickly in space because of the two-hour daily exercise regimen that space going humans must complete to stave off the bone and muscle loss caused by micro-gravity. What astronauts do when their clothes get stinky might not be the kind of quandary that keeps Americans up at night, but right now those dirty duds are summarily blasted into space as trash destined to burn up as it reenters Earth’s atmosphere, reports Marcia Dunn for the Associated Press (AP). NASA is teaming up with the company that makes Tide laundry detergent to tackle a mundane problem in an extraordinary place: dirty clothes in space.
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