Late last week, it was announced that NASA had, pardon the pun, pissed away $154 million by creating a urinal/water fountain system that didn’t work. To witness how a more simple technology can have huge implications down here on this planet, watch this amazing video (Note: it is a little graphic, but it helps to remember that these are the real life conditions under which billions of people must actually get their water):
In many ways, the example of this technology as compared to the $154 million failure reminds of that old story about how NASA spent millions of dollars to create a pen that would allow its astronauts to write upside-down in the low-gravity environment of space. They were successful, but so too were the Russians–they simply used a pencil.
