[jessriedel]

> it costs them maybe $20K to send six months worth of clothes to the ISS per astronaut on a Dragon 2

Maybe true now, but this wasn't the case when this 2003 NASA article was written. It quotes >$5k/lbs for the Shuttle. Six months of clothes for a single person wearing each article for a week is still going to run, what, at least 40lbs, or >$200k. With six people on the ISS, that's at least few million bucks per year, and likely more. The ISS must have been planned to last minimum 10 years (without anything cheap like Dragon on the horizon), so I think it's still a valid question why they didn't design a small washing machine.