MYRTLE CREEK — Bill Michalek’s morning hello comes with an offer of a cup of coffee.
“We have delicious Folger’s instant because that’s what I drink, and the guy who drinks real coffee is not here this morning,” Michalek says.
He’s wearing a blue polo with a silver dollar-sized NASA insignia on it. Michalek is the director of Umpqua Research Company in Myrtle Creek.
Behind the company’s inconspicuous offices across from Millsite Park, researchers are building machines that might be on board the first manned trip to Mars.
The company has been working with NASA and other aerospace firms since the early 1970s. It developed a water purification device that was on the first NASA space shuttle missions, a microbial check valve that fits in one hand.
“There’s probably one out in Texas somewhere from that shuttle that blew up,” Michalek said.
In 2007, URC was inducted into the Space Technology Hall of Fame.
Michalek and his team are developing technologies that help astronauts do something people don’t often think about on Earth — breathe.
During long trips into space — potentially several years to and from Mars — giving crews a constant supply of oxygen isn’t easy, Michalek said. Spacecrafts can’t carry tanks with all the oxygen crew members need throughout an entire mission because weight in space is expensive.
“We pretty much focus on the nuts and bolts of things, and we gotta recycle oxygen,” Michalek said.
When people exhale, they breathe out carbon dioxide. The key to providing astronauts with a steady stream of oxygen for long periods of time in space is recycling oxygen contained in the carbon dioxide that people exhale.
Michalek said a promising technology called a Bosch reactor, which URC is currently developing for NASA, could be the most efficient way to recycle oxygen ever developed.
“The reaction has been known for a long time, we can do it,” said laboratory director Tom Williams, the guy who drinks real coffee, according to Michalek.
Williams wasn’t in the lab early that day because a machine that automatically analyzes samples wasn’t working the night before. He was there until midnight analyzing samples manually.
The Bosch reactor uses hydrogen to decompose carbon dioxide that people exhale when onboard a spacecraft. The reaction produces water, which can be separated into oxygen for astronauts to breathe, and hydrogen, which can be recycled to decompose more exhaled carbon dioxide.
But the reaction also produces solid carbon. And figuring out a way to safely contain the solid carbon byproduct is the hard part in developing a Bosch reactor.
“The innovation here is developing an effective way for this reaction to take place and to capture that carbon,” Williams said.
