Laundry on the ISS is a losing game. You wear the shirt. It stinks. You pack it in a bag. The bag leaves the station and burns up in the atmosphere. Waste? Absolutely. But for three-week trips it’s fine.
Mars isn’t three weeks. Mars is years. Resupply runs aren’t coming. If you can’t wash your clothes you can’t have them. Not really. You end up rotting in synthetic fabrics.
Gabe Xu sees it as a problem of microbes. Odors are just the side effect of bacteria throwing a party in your cotton shirt. Kill the party guests, the smell goes away.
Xu from the University of Alabama at Huntsville and NASA’s Chelsi Cassilly built a “laundry gun”. It shoots cold plasma at fabric. Not fire. Not steam. Plasma. Specifically a beam of ions created by zapping a mix of helium air and water vapor.
The ions squeeze into every tiny nook of the material. They find the bacteria. They force oxidative stress onto the microbes. That sounds scientific because it is but essentially the microbes drink poison. And die.
Does UV light work? Sometimes. Some microbes shrug it off. Nothing shrugs off this kind of internal toxicity. If you eat arsenic you die. End of story. Tests showed spore counts on cotton drop from 250k per ml to 60k. That is a massive drop. And the fabric? It survives.
Think about welding arcs. Hot. Dangerous. This plasma jet is cool. Xu puts his hand right into it. Safe.
Can you buy this at Best Buy tomorrow? Probably not. The current head cleans an area smaller than a centimeter. It is tedious. Painful. Who has the patience for that?
Xu and Cassilly know this. They are sketching bigger machines. A plasma washing machine that floods a chamber. A vacuum cleaner attachment for surfaces. Maybe even a couch cleaner.
On the Moon or Mars astronauts want to sit somewhere nice. Not just sleep. Sit. Relax. They can’t have dirty furniture. They need a couch they can clean.
This tech makes that possible. It turns sterile survival into actual living.
We always think space hygiene means scrubs and sweat. It might mean zapping your jeans with electricity. Weird. Necessary?
Probably.
Is the plasma washing machine ready? Not yet. But the idea is sitting there waiting. Clean clothes on Mars sounds like a luxury until you realize it is just basic decency.
How do you scrub out the sweat when the water stays frozen in your suit?
