But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? Astronaut pee, silly.

[sl8]

From http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/090911-space-water-dump.html :

The beautiful trail in the sky looked like a mysterious celestial event. In reality, it was urine.

Some skygazers were treated to the unexpected view of a bright sparkling glow Wednesday night, created when astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery dumped the waste out into space.

The water dump was a scheduled task for STS-128 pilot Kevin Ford, who poured out urine and waste water stored aboard the shuttle in preparation for a landing attempt Thursday. Weather thwarted that try, but astronauts plan another landing attempt Friday at 5:48 p.m. EDT (2148 GMT) in Florida, though rain and high winds are expected again.

The light show Wednesday was aided by an unusually large amount of water being dumped all at once - about 150 pounds (68 kg), said NASA spokeswoman Kylie Clem. Discovery had just undocked from the International Space Station the day before, and had not been able to unload waste water during the 10-day visit.

[aquart]

1. But..but I thought they converted it into drinking water?

[Statistical]

2. On the ISS they have limited reclamation systems...

The space shuttle was designed for short term missions of < 3 weeks with 90% of them being less than 10 days. It doesn't make sense from a weight, cost, complexity standpoint to reclaim waste water for such short trips.

On something like a moon base or 4 month trip to mars reclamation will be essential.

[Hestia]

3. So, literally, there isn't a place in our Universe where we haven't pissed. Can't we even get this

right?

[Confusious]

4. No, the rest of universe

the galaxy and 90% of the solar system is piss-free.

It's just the earth-moon area that has been pissed on (in?).

A small, but large, distinction. :)

[Buns_of_Fire]

5. Oh, look at the sparkly Trickle-Down!

I remember several years ago when a block of frozen stuff crashed through someone's ceiling in the midwest. They thought it was from outer space. It turned out that it was the frozen contents of an airliner's "black water" tank that had erroneously been ejected.

Being hit by an asteroid is one thing. Being hit by a chunk of frozen poo REALLY adds insult to injury.