Page 176 - MY STORY

contaminated with deposited metal that it froze up

completely, and could not be cleared. Not good for the
astronauts.
We recommended something simple, adding some

corrosion protection chemicals to the water, like sodium
dichromate, to inhibit the corrosion. NASA did not like
that idea because the coupling that attached the coolant

line to the astronaut’s suit was at the crotch, and if there
was any spillage of fluid while coupling (or decoupling)
the coolant line, it would look like the astronauts were

peeing down their pants. Sodium dichromate solution
was very yellow.

Our research people (MDRL) “came to the rescue”, after
a thorough investigation to add “chelating” elements to
the fluid to keep stuff in solution. Unfortunately, that

made it worse because putting more stuff into solution
ended up with more metal ions floating around causing

even more catastrophic clogging of the pump. We
entertained a complete redesign of the pump (which came
from the Apollo program), but NASA had neither the

time or money to qualify a newly designed pump and did
not want to remove the silver from the anti-bacteria
coolant. Ultimately they accepted the simple initial