NASA is sending up a $19 million dollar toilet to the International Poo Space Station today.

They want us to know that it is a very, very special toilet worthy of such a price tag.  In fact, it recycles.  Astronauts can drink their pee.

A few points:

• for $19 million, I’d drink my own, un-recycled pee…maybe
• seems like for, say  a cool million, we could buy a whole lotta diapers
• and perhaps for, say a couple hundred thousand, we could get a trap door crapper flapper from The Home Depot that sends their deposits into the dark abyss of space as a sign that we are alive and well (maybe while we monitor the space continuum for radio signals and water, other worlds look for trails of excrement?)
• how much then does it take to recycle poo and get the astronauts to eat that?  now, THAT’S something I’d like to see my tax dollars going to – space poo pies.   They could even be frozen like Klondike bars…sorry, too far?

I don’t know.  I like tech advancements.  I’m waiting on the new, broadband iPhone, changed out my light bulbs to the energy efficient, mercury-filled, landfill polluting twister light bulbs (another blog for another day) and I spent hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars buying new software to work on the $100 Windows Vista that I just had to have.

But I’m sorry, I’m not drinking my own pee to save $100 a year.  I’ll take my chances on surviving the next ice age.