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[Michael Lopez-Alegria] Hello. I am Michael Lopez-Alegria,
commander of Expedition 14 on the International Space Station.
And along with Flight Engineer Suni Williams, who’s hanging around,
we wanted to talk to you about a couple of interesting things today.
You know, up here on our outpost 220 miles above the Earth,
we do a lot of science,
a lot of maintenance of the space station and a lot of construction.
But in addition to our job, we have to live here.
So we don’t go to work every day.
We actually live in the same place that we work.
And so we want to talk to you about what things we need to live,
and we call that life support.
And our entire system that does all that is called
the Environmental Control and Life Support System,
which sounds pretty complicated.
But it really boils down to about three things,
and that’s how we get air, water and food.
So, now Suni is going to talk to you a little bit more, and I will help her show you.
[Suni Williams] Thanks, Mike. The first thing
we are going to talk about is air, just like Mike has mentioned.
One of the important things about air on the space station:
It’s a closed environment -- so we need to have circulation and ventilation.
So I'm going to do a quick little demonstration
about how our air comes into the U.S. laboratory, for example,
where we are right now.
We have vents up here, up on what we call the overhead,
which obviously shoots air out and allows it to circulate.
As well, we have filters which suck air in. And they are located on the deck,
and we will show you one of those flying over here.
So, down here throughout the spacecraft in the lab on the deck,
there are filters which suck air in, which you can see with my card,
demonstrating that the air and particles get sucked into the filter.
And that’s a pretty nice thing for us, actually, because we are able to find little things
if we lose them because they are usually stuck down here on the filters.
So that’s pretty nice.
Another interesting thing about ventilation, just to talk about that a little bit more, is
you might be asking, "Why is it so important?"
Well, air -- just like any type of liquids up here -- might get stuck in a certain place.
And we need to be able to be breathing clean air and
not having to breathe carbon dioxide, which we give off, obviously, as we breathe.
So, one of the things that we need to have up here is oxygen.
Right here in front of me is the oxygen generation system, which we just installed.
I am going to open up the bottom part of the locker right here.
And what you will be able to see -- a lot of hydraulic fluid lines, water lines,
some electrical cables and some data cables --
this is computer-controlled equipment, which turns water into oxygen and hydrogen.
And that pure oxygen, we're able to breathe.
So the second part of what I was talking about
with the ventilation system is the carbon dioxide.
We have to get rid of that. We have to scrub that out of the system.
So I am going to show you
our carbon dioxide removal system. Stand by.
So our equipment is located in lockers. And this right here is our equipment
which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
It scrubs out the carbon dioxide.
Along with that, as you know, there are other things
that are in the air that are harmful to breathe.
So we have a contaminate cleaning, a contaminate control system,
and that’s located in this locker.
And this equipment here scrubs out harmful impurities in the air
so that we breathe clean, fresh air and good oxygen.
The next thing we are going to talk about is water.
And the water that we have comes in these containers right here,
which is called a collapsible water container -- CWC.
As you can see, it's filled up with about 45 liters of water.
And this is how we get water to use to drink and, also,
for any other types of things we are going to need (it) for,
like the oxygen generation system and … cleaning the bathroom.
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