Waste Management Capacity Calculator

This calculator starts from NASA per-crew-member waste generation figures — about 0.11 kg/day of solid (fecal) waste, 1.5 kg/day of urine, and 0.5 kg/day of packaging and other trash, in the range of the nominal values in NASA's Life Support Baseline Values and Assumptions Document (BVAD, NASA/TP-2015-218570/REV2) — and sums them across your crew size to get total daily waste output. The recycling level you select doesn't change how much waste is produced; it changes how much of that waste actually needs disposal versus how much gets diverted into reclamation loops. Basic systems (level 1) only divert about 15% of waste, leaving 85% for disposal; moderate systems (level 2) divert 40%, leaving 60%; advanced systems (level 3) divert 65%, leaving only 35% for storage and eventual jettison or return. Urine recovery is modeled separately and more aggressively, since water reclamation from urine is one of the highest-value recycling loops in a closed-loop life support system: basic systems recover none, moderate systems recover 70%, and advanced systems (matching real ISS-class water recovery hardware) recover 93%, which is then reported as usable recovered water rather than waste.

Storage volume assumes about 0.005 cubic meters per kilogram of compacted waste destined for disposal. Processing power scales with system sophistication too — a basic setup needs only 0.2 kW, while an advanced multi-stage recovery system draws 1.5 kW continuously. The key assumption to watch: recycling level is treated as a single dial across solids, trash, and urine together, when in a real habitat these are often independent subsystems (e.g., a facility might have excellent water recovery but basic solid-waste compaction), so use this as a system-sizing estimate rather than a precise architecture spec.