With increasing global water scarcity and the growing demand for sustainable water solutions, it's time to look beyond Earth for inspiration.
Space-based systems are designed under extreme constraints: minimal resupply, closed-loop cycles, and the need for ultra-high efficiency. These systems treat wastewater—including urine and humidity condensate—into potable water through compact, energy-efficient, and highly reliable processes.
On Earth, by contrast, water treatment is energy- and infrastructure-intensive, often requiring separate systems for desalination, sewage treatment, and groundwater purification.
Could applying space-based wastewater technologies on Earth reduce our dependency on large-scale plants, lower costs, and improve sustainability?
Join the United Nations Office for Outr Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and the Prince Sultan Bin Abduaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW) for a Webinar that critically assesses the economic implications, scalability, and technological gaps between space and Earth systems. It explores potential advantages such as modularity, efficiency, and reduced environmental footprint—as well as the limitations, including cost, maintenance complexity, and scalability for large populations.
As part of the Space4Water Webinar Series, the talk will discuss what Earth can learn from space: what technologies could realistically be transferred, what adaptations are needed, and what systemic changes could enable the adoption of closed-loop water systems for cities, industries, or remote communities.
As water stress grows globally, lessons from orbit could shape a more resilient and efficient water future on Earth.
The speakers are:
Christophe Lasseur, Former Head of the MELiSSA project, retired since 2024.
Dr. Francesc Gòdia Casablancas, Manager of MELiSSA Pilot Plant, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).
Dr. Sherine El-Baradei, Associate Professor of Water and Environmental Engineering, German University in Cairo.
The webinar will be followed by a panel discussion.
The webinar will take place on Wednesday, 18 June 2025 from 15:00 - 16:15 GMT+3 via Microsoft Teams.
MELiSSA (Micro Ecological LIfe Support System Alternative) was conceived as a circular Life Support System for humans in long-term Space exploration missions.
Over the years, for historical reasons, space missions have approached life support systems by the addition of sub-systems designed and sized independently. Nowadays, the key challenge is not merely to maintain human life in space but to reduce the embarked mass to allow for longer missions beyond low-Earth orbit. This challenge of mass reduction encourages innovative solutions for developing novel life support systems as an assembly of all sub-systems interconnected on their liquid, solid and gas phases. The challenge in terms of stability is tremendous and requires a very fine piloting assuming a dynamic control of all subsystems leading to stability as well as resources recovery, energy control, risk management and crew time. This challenge to design a circular system is in its approach the same that industrial ecology, more recently referred to as the "circular economy".