Simple Microgravity Laundry System

About the Challenge

Currently, the International Space Station (ISS) has no laundry capability. On ISS today, all crew clothing, washcloths, and towels,are discarded after they are sufficiently soiled. This requires continual resupply of approximately 0.5 kg/crew/day to replace disposed items. As missions go beyond low earth orbit, there will be no opportunity to resupply additional clothing. In addition, the duration of time spent in space increases as a mission goes beyond low-earth orbit. Therefore, the mass of clothing required to support a crew and the volume to store that clothing become substantial when clothing is discarded and not recycled. This Challenge is seeking a new approach to laundry. For this Challenge, laundry refers to washing, with liquid phase cleaning agent (not necessarily water), to remove soil and odor from clothing, as well as drying to remove any residual fluid from the clothing. Although laundry systems have been previously studied by NASA, the proposed designs have been overly complex and inadequately addressed operation in microgravity. The process of performing laundry typically involves the following steps:

1. Laundry is loaded into the washing machine.
2. A cleaning agent and a liquid (typically water) are added to the machine typically (though not necessarily) automatically.
3. Agitation of the clothing, water and cleaning agent occur.
4. The cleaning agent and water is removed from the clothing.
5. Additional liquid (typically water) is added and clothing is rinsed of cleaning agents.
6. Gross water removal is performed to remove as much water is possible.
7. Clothing is transferred to another machine for drying (if the dryer is a separate machine).
8. Clothing drying is performed.

This Challenge is really meant to focus on steps 1 through 6 although Solvers are invited to consider designs that address step 1-8 if they would like. The simple laundry Challenge seeks concepts for a minimal system that provides laundry freshening and some amount of cleaning capability. The laundry system would enable clothing to be reused several times but not indefinitely as with conventional terrestrial laundry systems. It is the intent that this limited cleaning capability will significantly decrease laundry complexity and the impact on spacecraft resources, including water, consumables, and power. The mass of the laundry system equipment plus the required spacecraft resource mass to clean the clothing must be significantly less than the reduction in clothing mass that results from the ability to reuse clothing. Simple extensions of commercial/residual systems are very unlikely to meet NASA’s requirements. Information that is proprietary and cannot be shared or licensed to the Government should not be included. NASA will evaluate the Solver’s solution based on the limited cleaning/refreshing of clothing, the soundness of the technical approach to laundry, and how well the Solver’s solution has addressed integration of the laundry system to spacecraft resources (mass, volume, power, crew time), and requirements (noise/vibration, out gassing).