Q: How do astronauts do their laundry?
Q: How do astronauts do their laundry?
A: They don’t. There is no washing machine within 250 miles when astronauts are onboard the International Space Station.
Packing enough underwear for three members of an ISS Expedition crew to have a clean pair for every day of a 6-month stay would mean launching at least 540 pairs of underwear into orbit. Aside from taking up a lot of space, when underwear costs between $5,000 and $10,000 per pound to launch it into space, that becomes some very expensive underwear.
As a result, astronauts have to stretch out how long they wear the underwear that they can take with them in order to make it last for their whole stay. On the Russian Space Station Mir, that meant that cosmonauts generally had to wear their underwear for up to a week before it was time to put on a clean pair.
Dirty laundry is also ejected into space in unmanned “Progress” ships to carry supplies to the station. Once the supplies are unloaded, the ship is reloaded with trash and dirty laundry and released into space.
Source: www.nasa.gov
