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Throughout the history of manned space flight the supply of potable water to the astronauts has presented unique problems. Of particular concern has been the microbiological quality of the potable water. This has required the development of both preflight water system servicing procedures to disinfect the systems and inflight disinfectant addition and monitoring devices to ensure continuing microbiological control. The disinfectants successfully used to date have been aqueous chlorine or iodine. Because of special system limitations the use of iodine has been the most successful for inflight use and promises to be the agent most likely to be used in the future. Future spacecraft potable, hygiene, and experiment water systems will utilize recycled water. This will present special problems for water quality control. NASA is currently conducting research and development to solve these problems.

A shower test was conducted recently at NASA-JSC in which waste water was reclaimed and reused. Test subjects showered in a prototype whole body shower following a protocol similar to that anticipated for Space Station. The waste water was purified using reverse osmosis followed by filtration through activated carbon and ion exchange resin beds. The reclaimed waste water was maintained free of microorganisms by using both heat and iodine. This paper discusses the test results, including the limited effectiveness of using iodine as a disinfectant and the evaluation of a Space Station candidate soap for showering. In addition, results are presented on chemical and microbial impurity content of water samples obtained from various locations in the water recovery process.

Iodine is a flight-proven disinfectant which because of its unique properties, will probably be used on the Space Station and future manned spaceflight applications. However, present knowledge of and experience with iodination is insufficient to assess crew safety when used in conjunction with reclamation or recycle systems, especially if the reclaimed water is consumed.