Roll Tide

I love to do the laundry! Peggy did it all for the first many years of our marriage, and that's not fair, so I have more or less taken it over so she can concentrate on more pressing issues such as paying the bills, scheduling repairs and doctor visits, and cat maintenance.  

I get a huge thrill from dumping a load of dirty raiment into one steel box and then another, folding the t-shirts with my shirtfolder (left) and pairing the sox so they look like little cotton toys. Seeing catsup stains go away by using blue Dawn dish soap excites me as much as the discovery of electricity did Ben Franklin, and I don't have to go out in the rain to do it!

Side effects of this hobby include looking at other people's clothes and wondering how they launder, or IF they even do. And I'm quick to offer unsolicited tips, such as using Dawn as spot pre-treatment, and getting little laundry bags for sox so that one of them doesn't wind up in the pocket of a bathrobe or something.

But we can all stop wondering how astronauts do their laundry in space, because...they don't.

Much like kids at camp, they keep on their undies and sox and gym stuff until they can't take the stench any longer, then they toss them in the junkpile.

It's no surprise that NASA does not care for this, Throwing away dirty clothes to be burned up in the atmosphere aboard discarded cargo ships is bad from any angle. They are teaming with Procter & Gamble Co.  - proud manufacturers of Tide - to come up with a space laundry system to those clothes can be reused over and over.

P&G is so into this, they are sending several Tide detergent and stain removal experiments up with the space station later this year to wage an intergalactic battle against soil and stain and ring around the collar.

This is forward thinking, as our nation and others plan to have people living on the moon and Mars in the future. They are not taking suggestions as to who should live up there, though. I checked.

You have to figure, there's not much space on a rocket ship, so if the same T-shirt can be laundered seven times, that saves the space of packing six extra shirts. And astronauts work out a couple of hours every day, because weightlessness is hard on the human bones, and there's no cable out there to watch reruns on. So they need more shirts and shorts than most.

Leland Melvin, former college football player, and astronaut, works out.

First, P&G is going to send up special space detergent so scientists can see how it works out.  After that, they are making stain-removal pens and wipes, and surely will have new SPACE TIDE! on supermarket shelves before you can count down 5-4-3-2-1.

P&G is also working on a washer-dryer that will work on the moon or Mars. There being no drain available on spaceships or distant planets, this machine will use reclaimed water (urine and sweat).

And if that's a challenge to the engineers, think of how the advertising community will sell it to us.

"Hmmm! Smells like last night's iced tea!"