happened back around 1984 or 85. I read an article in "Aviation Week & Space Technology" stating that engineers had hit a critical problem that had them stumped. The problem was how to provide all of the water they'd need on the station for doing laundry. Engineers had estimated that it'd take several pounds of water per person per day to do laundry. I forget the exact number quoted in the article, but I remember they said for a 7 member crew on a 90 day mission, you'd have to fly a dedicated Shuttle mission just to carry sufficient water. I knew then the station was in deep trouble from an engineering perspective.

This was at a time when NASA was still having trouble making a zero gravity toilet work reliably. Can you imagine the difficulty with a zero gravity washing machine?

The station was being billed as a shirt sleeve environment. Why would they need so many clothes? What about wearing something on the order of a pair of gym shorts, underwear, and a tee shirt? A 90 day supply of those wouldn't cost very much and would certainly be lighter than all of that water.

It immediately brought to mind a story from Walt Cunningham's book, "The All American Boys". Cunningham was a member of the notorious Apollo 7 crew, the ones that gave the ground controllers so much grief that none of them ever flew again. After Apollo 7, Cunningham went to work on the Skylab project. Following each Skylab mission, the engineers went through an extensive debriefing to learn about living on a space station. One of their bigger gripes had to do with the water dispenser. It seemed that the spring in the dispenser was so strong that an astronaut in a zero g environment had a hell of a time getting any water (poor leverage). It seems the engineers had designed that component without considering the microgravity environment. I suspected the same thing was happening all over again on the new space station. I suspected then that the station was heading for design disaster. So far, that suspicion has been confirmed by events.