Although we tend to see mostly the glorious and fun parts of hanging out in a space station, the human body will not cease to do its usual things, whether it involves the digestive system, or even something as mundane as the hair that sprouts from our heads. After all, we do not want our astronauts to return to Earth after a half-year stay in the ISS looking as if they got marooned on an uninhabited island. Introducing the onboard barbershop on the ISS, and the engineering behind making sure that after a decade the ISS doesn’t positively look like it got the 1970s shaggy wall carpet treatment.
The basic solution is rather straightforward: an electric hair clipper attached to a vacuum that will whisk the clippings safely into a container rather than being allowed to drift around. In a way this is similar to the vacuums you find on routers and saws in a woodworking shop, just with more keratin rather than cellulose and lignin.
On the Chinese Tiangong space station they use a similar approach, with the video showing how simple the system is, little more than a small handheld vacuum cleaner attached to the clippers. Naturally, you cannot just tape the vacuum cleaner to some clippers and expect it to get most of the clippings, which is where both the ISS and Tiangong solutions seems to have a carefully designed construction to maximize the hair removal. You can see the ISS system in action in this 2019 video from the Canadian Space Agency.
Of course, this system is not perfect, but amidst the kilograms of shed skin particles from the crew, a few small hair clippings can likely be handled by the ISS’ air treatment systems just fine. The goal after all is to not have a massive expanding cloud of hair clippings filling up the space station.
The Suck Kut is real!
It really does suck!
I found my tribe.
Party time! Excellent!
I am surprised the article never mentioned the flowbee.
Yes, a Flowbee cut could become THE look for space!
One day I went to a local barber shop. They did great haircut and they actually used a Shop-Vac to vac my hair. And I actually did like it. I told to other barbers about using a vacuum cleaner, but they just laughed at me.
It does really work well. Just kinda look awkward.
All the haircutters I’ve been to in Japan shopvac your head real quick after your cut.
Close, but not quite what I was expecting: a space-qualified Flowbee.
The Flowbee only did mullets, hence the current machine, if memory serves me.
I wonder about the process of testing and qualifying the system for flight?
I think the mullet was just the style at the time, not a requirement of the flowbee.
I have a flowbee and can confirm that it can only do mullets or really christian haircuts.
A Flowbee can’t do a mullet without a skilled operator, which defeats to point of a Flowbee.
They can do a basic boy haircut.
Girls/Inbetweens will flee at the suggestion.
They are not the target market.
Strange. I’ve always thought that a haircut every year or two was often enough.
I’m in my 60s and I haven’t had a haircut since I was 19. That’s often enough.
I still think they should just use all that waste material as propellant for stationkeeping. Just vent that hose out the back end of the station. It would save carrying up propellant and would reduce the need to dispose of waste with a cargo vehicle. It even would reduce the burden on the carbon dioxide removal/air processing system: The make up air would be clean.
The station also vents methane overboard as a waste product from the carbon dioxide scrubbers: add that to the waste exhaust stream and increase the thrust.
What strikes me again is that the Chinese seem to have this strong convention about up/down, not embracing the absence of gravity, very odd.
I immediately thought Flowbee and expected they would use something like that to keep floating particles of hair at a minimum.
DIY Space Barber: https://youtu.be/qAVwic3keG0?si=ogmwuOuPlRQeNDPR