How do astronauts wash their clothes and shower in the ISS where the water supply is very limited?

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How do astronauts wash their clothes and shower in the ISS where the water supply is very limited?

In: Engineering

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Astronauts don’t wash their clothes at all. They simply discard them as trash once they’re done. They wear them for longer than we do here on Earth – a couple of days for socks and underwear and sometimes weeks for pants and shirts. Clothes don’t dirty as quickly in microgravity because they’re mostly floating around the body and not making much skin contact.

As for bathing, they essentially take towel baths. They wet a towel, apply some soap to the skin, scrub, and wipe it off. [Here’s a video of astronaut Karen Nyberg washing her hair](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOIj7AgonHM) where she talks about the bathing process.

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