A.C.E.S. Online - The Future of Space Exploration

Why isn't the waste hydrogen from electrolysis of water retained and used as an energy source on the ISS?

That is a very good question.  When I was onboard the station, the ISS was under construction and the only closed loop life support system was the water system on the Russian segment.  The Russian electron vented the Hydrogen gas overboard, as it did on the MIR station.  The US side collected condensate water in water bags and sent it to the Russian segment to be fed into the electron.  The US and the Russians scrubbed the CO2 out of the atmosphere and vented it overboard.

Since that time, the US has developed a system to produce electricity by electrolysis and a system that uses the electrolysis byproduct H2 with the waste CO2 to produce water by the Sabatier method.   

Having worked in engineering research for the Airforce for five years, I have developed a somewhat skeptical perspective on government-private partnerships. You have spoken highly of this arrangement. Could you provide any cautions about these from your experience?

With respect to the government-private partnerships, it is important for the government to carefully monitor the private companies effort through an effective insight model, where NASA engineers are able to view the engineering performance of the team.  The government should lay out milestones with the private company to ensure that the company is meeting their milestones sufficiently.  In the early days of the commercial cargo program, one of the original companies, Kistler Rocketplane, missed several financing milestones and NASA had to end the partnership.  They then selected Orbital Sciences (my team), who performed well, developing a spacecraft, a rocket and a launch site, with the company investing as much as NASA contributed for the development. 

While in space how did you all deal with stir craziness from being in the same space for months at a time? Was it common among astronauts?

I really never went stir-crazy.  I was able to communicate with my wife everyday, and received electronic newspapers so I kept track of current events at home.  We had email, movies on DVD, and I of course had the musical instruments.  And we had interesting work to do every day on the space station supporting science experiments and maintaining equipment. 

Near the end of the mission, NASA extended our mission by 6 weeks due to delays in our return shuttle flight launch.  That extension, and NASA’s reluctance to give us challenging new tasks, led to some boredom for our crew.  However, we always had great views of Earth, and we were weightless, which was always entertaining.

On a trip to Mars, where crews would not have great views of Earth and potential communications delays, stir-craziness will be a much bigger factor for NASA to deal with.