Don Pettit doesn’t mind drinking his own urine or his sweat, for that matter. Pettit is far from insane. As an astronaut, he has no choice but to drink all available fluids. Welcome to extreme water recycling.
“You make water inside your body, through your breath and your sweat,” explains Pettit, a veteran NASA astronaut who has lived on the International Space Station for six months. “On the ISS you capture all of that water and recycle it.”
Astronauts are each allowed only 3.5 liters of water per day – for hygiene and food combined. They wash themselves using wet wipes, and so they consume 92% less water on hygiene than Earth-dwellers.