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To me it sounds like preview of Mars missions. The things breaking and having to be repaired with only the stuff available on board. Hi-tech complexity vs. simplicity. The more complex coffee machines, with iPad and rich UX/etc., in our office break more frequently than the simpler ones and definitely wouldn't make it to Mars without several rounds of repairs.

In a recent Mars flight series (on Netflix if i remember correctly) the water filtration machine broke midflight and the crew started to take it apart and stopped doing it - recognizing impossibility of such a repair endeavor - after taking out 4000 something pieces, and that failure put them into a mortal danger. (Sidenote: I had though to suspend disbelief as it looked completely unreal to me that one of the crewmembers - a USSR/Russian cosmonaut - wouldn't immediately rig a simple distillation device to make drinking water - everybody in USSR was doing it everywhere to make moonshine, especially in the "dry" places like ocean ships, remote military bases, etc., and i can do it myself in a few minutes with as little as 4 pieces of generic kitchen wares :)




Unless there is a trick I don’t know, can only do distillation with gravity. Otherwise, liquid water floats with the gas.


Spin the unit and create a small gravitational force to separate the two mediums.


Mars mission, they had rotational gravity section.




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