Life in space is a challenge that only the best-trained people can undertake, but people on social media are losing their minds since finding out just how astronauts deal with their dirty clothes. While it's understandable that astronauts take a minimal amount of clothing into space, what do they do with their clothing once it’s been worn? At home, we have the luxury of using washing machines to ensure our clothes are always clean and smelling good, but on the International Space Station (ISS), things are a little different. If you think they have water, detergent and a bucket to manually scrub their clothing, think again. They actually don’t do laundry at all. In fact, they have a pretty weird way of dealing with dirty clothing. Because of how much water they would need to use to keep them clean, they instead wear them until they become too soiled to stomach, and then throw them out of the ISS and into the atmosphere where they will burn up upon their re-entry into earth. While that sounds gross, the ISS is carefully temperature controlled so astronauts aren’t sweating a lot, and it’s a somewhat sterile environment. Clothing is typically worn for several days before being discarded, often lasting up to a week for items like underwear. Currently, astronauts discard roughly 160 pounds of clothes per astronaut annually. NASA and Proctor & Gamble are collaborating on developing Tide Infinity, a biodegradable detergent formulated for low-water, micro-gravity and radiation-rich environments to clean astronaut clothing in space.
