45_auto
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aggieoutlaw said:Space is a vacuum. It is not hot. It is not cold.
So the astronauts and NASA are wrong? Urine doesn't instantly freeze when they dump it overboard?
From an interview with astronaut Russell Schweickart:
Schweickart: Well, actually, in Skylab we did something similar to that. But on Apollo the urine then would go outside, and you'd have to heat the nozzle because, of course, it instantly flashes into ice crystals. And, in fact, I told Stewart this, the most beautiful sight in orbit, or one of the most beautiful sights, is a urine dump at sunset, because as the stuff comes out and as it hits the exit nozzle it instantly flashes into ten million little ice crystals which go out almost in a hemisphere, because, you know, you're exiting into essentially a perfect vacuum, and so the stuff goes in every direction, and all radially out from the spacecraft at relatively high velocity. It's surprising, and it's an incredible stream of . . . just a spray of sparklers almost. It's really a spectacular sight. At any rate that's the urine system on Apollo.
http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/CoEvolutionBook/SPACE.HTML