This is a great read and unironically I want to subscribe to the substack, which is titled "Mars for the Rest of Us." The author is that Ceglowski of Pinboard and occasional space essays at idlewords.com, both of which make this self-recommending for me at least.

It's a cliche that space exploration creates discoveries that improve life back here on Earth. In the topics discussed in this essay, water reclamation and waste recycling especially, the future solutions developed I think will lead to improvements for terrestrial living.

A note on their section on fire extinguishing - just about all aerospace fire extinguishing systems use agents with a fluorine based chemistry. Putting out a fire dissociates some of the agent, and in the presence of humidified air it recombines and forms hydroflouric acid, which will eat you from the inside out. So your air scrubbers had best do a good job at removing acid gasses.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280646417_Acid_gas_...

    "The limiting factor in urine distillation is actually the high level of calcium 
    from disintegrating astronaut bone, a nice example of how problems in space find 
    ways to compound one another."

Sobering. One of the many long term effects of life away from Earth.[1]

With humanity's future probably (?) driving more of us to leave the planet, I'm glad these things are being studied. Where there's a will, there's a way.

[1] "Long-term space missions’ effects on the human organism: what we do know and what requires further research" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10896920

On water reclamation:

> On the Mir space station, this used to happen organically. Collecting water was a grubby job that involved chasing beach-ball sized spheres of condensate around the colder parts of the spacecraft with trash bags before they could climb into the walls and cause mayhem. Crew members spent three to four hours a day on this dirty and difficult task.

That sounds, frankly, horrible.

It made me think that the average space module probably smells like moist, reheated ass, too.

Curious that both average inputs and outputs match to exactly 5.74 kg. I had intuitively assumed there would be a significant difference, but I suppose that even if a lot of energy is extracted, the mass difference will be negligible, mc2 and all.

I'm also surprised that the vast majority of the output carbon is in the form of CO2 rather than feces.

It's all rather obvious in retrospect, it was just nice to see crystallized like this.