Bizarre Things Floating In Space

Posted by Almeda Bohannan on Thursday, May 2, 2024

All the movies and the books and the documentaries have such a way of making space flight so romantic, don't they? For them, it's all shimmering auroras and dawnbreak over Earth's horizon and somersaulting through space stations. But there's a dark side to the business, you know — a grim, grim dark side. You see, despite their propensity toward thrift and their insistence on recycling everything they can, eventually, spaceships have to jettison waste. Sometimes, this takes the form of a water dump. These dumps (which are often mistaken for shooting stars) eject urine and excess water out into the glorious cosmos, where it freezes into a cloud of miniscule ice droplets. After a while, the ice is melted by the Sun and turns into water vapor before floating off through space.

What this basically means is that, at any one moment during a major manned mission, there's likely to be a small mass of piss-cicles drifting listlessly across the night sky. And, statistically speaking, there's even a good chance someone saw them and made a wish.

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