Cape Canaveral, Fla. ? NASA’s revolutionary new space water recycling system is having serious hiccups.

The $154 million device for turning astronauts’ urine and sweat into drinking water aboard the international space station shut down again Friday, and engineers on the ground were scrambling to figure out what was wrong.

The astronauts and flight controllers are up against the clock: NASA wants samples of the processed urine before space shuttle Endeavour pulls away from the space station late next week. The recycled water needs to be tested back on Earth before anyone up there can drink it and NASA commits to doubling the size of the space station crew next year.

No one was surprised by the startup trouble. Space station commander Mike Fincke said it’s common for things to go wrong in a flight test and stressed that he wasn’t worried — so far. Nor was he concerned about eventually drinking the final product.

“It’s just the water that’s taken out,” Fincke said during a news conference. “It’s really clean and purified water. In fact, it’s probably more pure than most people’s tap water. So I’m not afraid to drink it.”

Of all the home-improvement gear delivered to the space station by Endeavour, the water recycling system has drawn the most attention. NASA sees it as the future in deep-space exploration — and also to future life on the home planet.

“This technology of how to reuse our things and be careful with them is really applicable to life on planet Earth,” Fincke said.

Converting urine into drinking water for space station astronauts is not all that different from what happens at water treatment plants on Earth — at a much smaller scale.

“What goes around comes around,” said Bob Bagdigian, project manager at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

“The waste that we generate gets discharged somewhere, and that all becomes part of the water cycle through waste treatment systems,” he said earlier this week.