Question about the space station?

Question

Human lungs need air. How are they all breathing so much for so long? Do they know how to recycle carbon dioxide? and if so why not use it against what is happening with global warming? I know the space station is said to have about as much room as a house and if i airtight locked myself in this house, besides going crazy because lack of space, how long before it runs out of air?

If you can answer that, that would be great. :)

ok cool, so how does it work then?

Answer 1

Spaceships use devices that purge air of carbon dioxide and replenish it with oxygen. In the past this was done with simply having onboard pressurized oxygen and lithium hydroxide canisters for carbon dioxide removal. These are disposable units and therefore best suited for shorter flights.

On the International Space Station, which has to keep going for years and years, they have re-usable systems. Carbon dioxide is removed with sorbent beds that can be used repeatedly by subjecting them to heat and space vacuum between uses.

Oxygen on the station is produced by electrolysis of water. Water, on the other hand, is supplied from Earth, but also water used on the station is recycled very carefully, air humidity and even crew urine is gathered, cleansed and re-used by machinery. Of course water purity is also very carefully controlled. This I believe is reasonable because it is very expensive to haul water up to the station with rockets and shuttles, but plenty of electricity for the cleansing processes is available thanks to solar power.

This brings us to your other question, why same sorts of processes couldn't be used to cleanse the atmosphere of carbon dioxide. This is due to the scale of the problem here on Earth; the amounts of carbon dioxide down here are so massive that building and running equipment to capture it would require huge amounts of money, resources and energy. Also, we already have plants, which all do the same work through photosynthesis, but seems we aren't even capable of keeping enough of them around to sustain a healthy atmosphere.

EDIT: After some searching found this page that has a lot of details on the Russian life support systems on the station, including the CO2 systems:

http://suzymchale.com/mks/lss-iss.html

Answer 2

Someone doesn't watch space movies. Yes they have ways of purifying the air, they are called CO2 scrubbers. Haha, good luck trying to make that an actually way to stop/slow global warming. lol

Answer 3

They use chemicals (like lithium hydroxide) that absorb CO2 from the air.