Experts are also taking a fresh look at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's 1996 Project Orion, a "space broom" concept to fry spacetrash with ground-based lasers.
Experts say retaining such data would be prohibitively expensive since the unallocated space is essentially a trash bin that is altered each time a key is tapped.
Instead of backing up data to an external hard drive, a chore as popular in our home as taking out the trash, we staked out disk space on each machine and opened it to the other computers on the home front.
Trash tiles could, for example, bolster the space radiation shielding around the astronauts' sleeping quarters or perhaps a small area in the spacecraft that would be built up to serve as a storm shelter to protect crews from solar flare effects, NASA officials said.
"One of the ways these discs could be reused is as a radiation shield because there's a lot of plastic packaging in the trash, " Mary Hummerick, a Qinetiq North America microbiologist at Kennedy Space Center in Florida working on the project, said in a statement.