The space station doesn't have curb-side trash pickup. Nor does it have a local landfill or recycling plant. What it does have is access to a naturally efficient incinerator - Earth's atmosphere. [2] Astronauts pack several thousand pounds of the stuff into a rather unusual trash can - an expendable cargo resupply spacecraft. When it is time to "take out" the trash, the filled cargo spacecraft undocks from the International Space Station and falls into Earth's atmosphere, where the spacecraft and its contents are vaporized. [3] That's because a solid object entering Earth's atmosphere at approximately 17,500 mph will experience significant friction created by the drag of compressing atmospheric gases. As the spacecraft plunges deeper into the atmosphere, where the air is denser, a tremendous amount of energy is released as heat. This forces the gas molecules to dissociate. A spacecraft without a heat shield, like these expendable cargo vehicles, experiences the same heating, vaporizing the solid material. [4] Replicating this high-temperature trash processing on Earth is precisely what InEnTec Inc. is doing, with some help from NASA arc jet research and technology. [5] NASA learned how to recreate the extreme temperatures and speeds of atmospheric entry decades ago as a way to test heat shields. InEnTec, based in Richland, Washington, looked to the power source modifications NASA used to generate high-temperature plasma and incorporated them into its technology design to create its Plasma Enhanced Melter (PEM). The PEM transforms waste material into synthetic gas and ot