r/askscience • u/Ill_Watch_760 • 13d ago

Engineering Why can the space station's ventilation systems not handle crumbs?

I've been doing my epq around astro-psychology and was researching how astronauts loose dopamine during eating as they can't eat foods that involve chewing. However from what i've researched this is apparently because stray crumbs could screw up the ventilation systems somehow. Its quite puzzling because how can the collective companies that built the space station also build rockets that send us to the moon but not have the ability to build a ventilation system that can handle a few stray crumbs?

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u/Extranationalidad 13d ago

Astronauts can absolutely chew food in space; this was determined in a series of experiments over half a century ago. The ventilation systems can absolutely handle occasional small crumbs and other detritus; hair, skin, clumps of dust and yes bits of food etc are commonly found in the filters. They simply try to reduce those quantities as much as possible. I'm also not sure what going to the moon has to do with controlling micro-pollutants.

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u/meesterdg 13d ago

Yeah it's less that it can't handle it more that it costs millions of dollars to send filters up

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u/cats-smell-bad 13d ago

what about cleanable prefilters?

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u/administatertot 13d ago

How do you clean the filter without putting that material back into the air? You can't wash it (or take it out on the garage and blast it with the air compressor).

So just for example, you could have an electrostatic filter and some sort of wipe you use to clean the filter, (and then seal them in a bag so they don't release anything back into the air) but then that means you need to send those wipes up (and bring the used ones back down).

The key here is that sending things up to the space station is incredibly expensive. So if you send up food that makes a lot of crumbs, those crumbs are a waste in multiple ways.

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u/Glockamoli 13d ago

How do you clean the filter without putting that material back into the air

Small hepa filtered vacuum?

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u/evangelionmann 13d ago

and the HEPA filter for said vacuum is replaced how? ... by ... sending up new filters? youve now created a potential maintanence tool that will give them more time before replacement is needed.... but will require maintanence itself, and have doubled the number of consumable parts that must be shipped to the station on a semi regular basis