Mmm, Mmm, Good! Astros Toast With Recycled Urine

The crew of the International Space Station toasted successful testing of their new water-recycling system with sips of recycled sweat and urine yesterday, CNET reports. "The taste is great," US astronaut Michael Barratt said as his Russian colleague Gennady Zyuganov chased a floating mouthful in zero gravity. "As Gennady is showing you, it's perfectly clear and worth chasing in zero G here."

"This is the kind of technology that'll get us to the moon and further, we hope," Barratt said. "We're just really, really happy to be here drinking this today." The system is key to NASA's plans to double the size of the station's crew to six. The cost of hauling water into space is so high that the $250 million system is expected to pay for itself in savings in a few years.
(More International Space Station stories.)