The Artemis II space mission is making history.
The longest distance humans have ever traveled in space? Check.
The first black, female and Canadian astronauts to circle the moon? Check it too.
Is this the first time a bathroom has made this trip? Big and important check.
Because while there are many important questions about space: is there life out there? Could we colonize Mars? How far does the universe really extend? — A question is very serious: What happens when nature calls to space?
This mission hopes to return with answers.
After years of research, the Orion spacecraft used in the Artemis II mission left Earth with a real bathroom, door and all.
In the first hours after the launch of the Orion capsule, some of the astronauts’ first reports were of their bathrooms malfunctioning. They fixed it quickly. But as they got closer to the moon, bathroom problems reigned again.
“If you’re going to do longer missions and eventually even have a base on the Moon or go even further on Mars, you first have to figure out: what are you going to do to get food, water and also to urinate and defecate on the spacecraft and on the surface?” KR Callaway, a writer for Scientific American, said Today, explained co-host Sean Rameswaram.
So the simple presence of a bathroom in this mission?
“It definitely makes history,” he said.
To understand the meaning, Sean sat down with Callaway to discuss the history and future of space toiletries. Below is an excerpt from their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full podcast, so give it a listen Today, explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Tell us about the history of the use of the facilities in the space.
So back in the ’60s and ’70s, [the] Apollo [program] I used these bags. They had different ones for urinating and different ones for defecating, but it was still essentially a bag that you taped to your body and just left. Obviously it didn’t provide much privacy. We’re not talking about walking into a room with a door and doing this; This was simply done in the cockpit and was not very user friendly either.
They had a lot of problems with leaks. You know, it’s just a sticker. It can become unstuck and in low gravity conditions, which can be a big problem for escaping particles.
I had a lot of fun reading the Apollo mission transcripts and watching all the ways the astronauts described this after use. They were quite upset about it. During the Apollo 10 mission, they said, There is excrement floating in the air.
So they had to squeeze it out themselves. And even before that, they were already in trouble. During Apollo 8, there was another quite notable mission where a crew member was sick. And so, the other crew members were chasing these drops of vomit and feces floating wildly around the cabin.
And one of the astronauts you cite in your article was Ken Mattingly, whose name people might know from the Apollo 13 mission and, of course, the Apollo 13 movie.
This was actually one of my favorite quotes I found while reviewing the mission transcripts. This is something Ken Mattingly said about Apollo 16: “I wanted to be the first man to get to Mars. This has convinced me that if we have to go to Apollo, I’m not interested.”
This whole bathroom situation is so unbearable that you may not want to spend much time in the space anymore.
So I imagine that NASA, after all the Apollo missions, realizes that it needs to advance this technology. How do you do it?
I spoke with Melissa McKinley at NASA. She is the head of the Toilet Project; the Universal Waste Management System is its technical name, although I have been assured that it is fine to simply say “toilet”. And he mentioned that everything that has happened from the ’60s and ’70s until now has really been a feat of engineering and design.
They have been able to implement a vacuum system that uses airflow to pull the particles down instead of just floating them in space and relying on you to seal the bag yourself and keep everything inside.
Help me imagine what it looks like, because I guess it doesn’t look like any bathroom in any of our houses.
More like an airplane bathroom, that’s how I would describe it.
The toilet has a seat and a funnel on the side to collect urine and luckily each has its own separate piece to place on the part that would actually touch your skin.
For the bathroom itself, it’s quite noisy there.
Astronauts have to wear hearing protection and also have handles to hold on to because they work in zero or low gravity and need a little help to stay in the correct position.
So these are no longer plastic bags. Where is this going? Are we just launching it into space?
We are partially launching it into space. The urine is collected and then vented a few times. It will be a controlled process, so it will be just a lot of liquid at a time, but yes, that’s where the urine goes.
For the poop, they store it on board and then it will be kept in an area of the spacecraft that will actually burn upon re-entry. He won’t return to Earth with them, but he will stay with them for a while.
And yet, all this testing, all this hype about this new toilet, and one of the first stories we get once the astronauts are in Earth orbit is that something went wrong with the toilet! What happened?
The bathroom has already had some problems. It’s kind of the equivalent of a plumbing problem, but for space.
When they were trying to use it on one of the first days of the mission, they discovered that there was a mistake. The problem ended up being with the fan that helps the air flow help with urine collection, a big problem. And fortunately with the support of ground control, [astronaut] In fact, Christina Koch was able to fix this problem almost immediately after it happened.
The last I heard over the weekend, they were having bathroom problems again, so it might not be the best plan for the astronauts to also be their plumbers. What is the latest in this very expensive and important toilet?
It appeared to break again over the weekend. From what the people at NASA were saying, it seems that it is the same problem with the urine collection system again. Engineers have looked into it a little deeper and believe it could be ice blocking the tube that would help fully collect the urine.
The astronauts reported problems with the collection system and then also a smell coming from the bathroom area. It’s definitely an issue they say they will continue to work on.
This whole bathroom thing may seem inconsequential considering what we’re really doing up there in space: exploring, making history, trying to get to Mars one day, everything else. Why is the bathroom important?
One of NASA’s goals with this particular toilet is for it to have a modular design, meaning they can put it not only in the Artemis II capsule, but they can also put it in many different space vehicles.
They could even adapt it for a mission to Mars and longer-term missions. They can adapt it to be able to do what the ISS does in terms of recycling liquids and make more sustainable and longer-term missions possible.
Although it seems very mundane to us as something that is used every day, to be in space, it is actually one of the key things that stands in the way of making space more homely and more capable of being a place where we can do science in the long term.
If you can’t discover the facilities, you will never be able to discover Mars.