"Eeew," said the mighty sandworm. "You're drinking your own pee!"

I used to think the future of drought-ravaged Southern Nevada necessarily involved roving bands of Tuscan raiders, driven half-mad with thirst, scouring the outlands for anything wet, even a bottle of Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. While that would be all post-apocalyptic and awesome and stuff, it looks like technology may save us yet.

That is, if you don’t mind the idea of, ahem, aggressive recycling in the form of drinking your own urine. Totally! The astronauts are gonna be drinking it when they’re blasted into space again:

NASA has spent decades perfecting a system to transform urine into water that can be used in space for drinking, food preparation and washing. Agency officials say the water from the system will be cleaner than U.S. tap water.

The new $250 million machine was being unpacked Wednesday at the space shuttle’s Florida launch site. Shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to take it to the station this fall. If all goes well, the so-called toilet-to-tap system will be fully operational in six months.

[snip]

A toilet to arrive on the station this fall will funnel liquid waste to the new system through pipes, but the wastewater from the station’s older toilet will have to be carried in tanks to the processing machine. There, water will be distilled from the waste and undergo six steps to cleanse it, including the addition of iodine to kill microbes. The machine will also suck in humidity from the astronauts’ sweat and breath and clean it.

The end product will fill the bowls of the new toilet and will also dribble from taps in a galley and a “hygiene center,” where astronauts will bathe and brush their teeth. The new machine will provide roughly half of the crew’s water intake, says Bob Bagdigian of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, including 1¾ gallons per person per day for drinking and food.

Surely you’ve heard that wheezy saw about how space exploration benefits all of us. It’s usually bullshit. I mean, astronaut ice cream hasn’t exactly become the snack of choice for Fringe night. And stalking romantic rivals while wearing a wig and a diaper never became a national craze. But tapping your own wiener for life-sustaining water? Mark my words:This whole NASA thing just may prove itself worthwhile yet.