More on what astronauts found “objectionable” and “distasteful” with Apollo's system, from the PDF linked in the OP (1):
"In general, the Apollo waste management system worked satisfactorily from an engineering standpoint. From the point of view of crew acceptance, however, the system must be given poor marks. The principal problem with both the urine and fecal collection systems was the fact that these required more manipulation than crewmen were used to in the Earth environment and were, as a consequence, found to be objectionable. The urine receptacle assembly represented an attempt to preclude crew handling of urine specimens but, because urine spills were frequent, the objective of “sanitizing” the process was thwarted.
The fecal collection system presented an even more distasteful set of problems. The collection process required a great deal of skill to preclude escape of feces from the collection bag and consequent soiling of the crew, their clothing, or cabin surfaces. The fecal collection process was, moreover, extremely time consuming because of the level of difficulty involved with use of the system. An Apollo 7 astronaut estimated the time required to correctly accomplish the process at 45 minutes.* Good placement of fecal bags was difficult to attain; this was further complicated by the fact that the flap at the back of the constant wear garment created an opening that was too small for easy placement of the bags.** As was noted earlier, kneading of the bags was required for dispersal of the germicide.
*Entry in the log of Apollo 7 by Astronaut Walter Cunningham.
**The configuration of the constant wear garments on later Apollo missions were modified to correct
this problem."
Did they not have the astronauts simulate the mission beforehand, on Earth? Wear the clothing, eat the meals, use the toilet, etc?
It sounds like that would have allowed them to fix the suit before they went?
They must have eaten the meals and such to be sure they could function, make sure they didn't have any intolerance, for example?
smallmancontrov 21 hours ago [-]
Warning: gross
Of course, but the fundamental problem is that difficulties compound. It starts with: pooping is much harder when gravity isn't there to persistently tug on the turd. Something that is slightly obnoxious on Earth (using a bag, using a suit flap) turns into an absolute trainwreck when you have a bag, a suit flap, and turd separation failure. Now you have to do precise mechanical manipulation of an object you don't want to touch behind your back through a bag and a suit flap, every failure multiplies the work, and now the turds can float away to multiply the work outside your immediate vicinity. Ditto for kneading the antibacterial into the poo: if you fail to do this thoroughly on Earth, bacterial offgassing causes the bag to vent, but in all likelihood that's the end of it because you can arrange for gravity to keep the poo away from the vent. In fact, you would probably do this without even thinking or imagining how it could go wrong. In zero gravity, you can't simply arrange "vent on top, poo on bottom", so the event is likely to launch aerosolized poo into your living environment where you have to put up with it for the next few days.
It's difficult to fully appreciate gravity until it's gone.
Astronauts are heroes for the risks they take, but they are also heroes for dealing with this.
asdff 20 hours ago [-]
Seems like a big issue is I'm guessing insistence on having this be a solo operation for cultural reasons. Seems like it would be easy with two astronauts. Have the one bend over and spread the cheeks wide with both hands, the other basically does the hand in the dog poop bag trick right as the poop is coming out and wipes them up after. No worse than what a nurse does every day for work.
smackeyacky 18 hours ago [-]
Perhaps nurses would be a better pool of astronaut candidates than test pilots.
I remember seeing a Russian space toilet when they had it set up in the powerhouse museum in Sydney. It looked like a booth with a vaguely pubic area shaped vacuum attachment designed to be unisex. I stared at it for some time trying to work out how it worked. The Apollo system seems horrendous!
riffraff 15 hours ago [-]
IIRC from the book " packing for mars" the American man astronauts begged NASA to provide them with diapers at some point, which is what women astronauts got, because the earlier male-only system was a sort of sucking condom which was incredibly bad.
darkwater 13 hours ago [-]
This really tells you how "bad masculinity" pervaded everything. I'm speaking of the designers here, not the astronauts. Why not a diaper also for male astronauts from the beginning? Isn't manly enough? Does it show weakness, like a toddler or an old dying man?
riffraff 11 hours ago [-]
I think the designers just didn't think of it.
Women also started with a feminized version of the uncomfortable device and then switched to diapers, and then men followed.
It's possible there were no women on the design team but I don't think it's a case of bad masculinity.
darkwater 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think that having or not having women in the design team is the key here. IMO it's more about how men perceive how men should be.
brikym 11 hours ago [-]
I'd take it over chasing a floating turd around and cleaning up the mess all over the walls.
5 hours ago [-]
raverbashing 13 hours ago [-]
Honestly replacing gravity with negative air pressure might have been the ideal solution
But I know that air is also a limited resource on space so it can't be solely an "airline-like system"
(Also discarding it "outdoors" might be the best solution in the end)
the_af 6 hours ago [-]
Space debris would have an additional meaning.
hammock 3 hours ago [-]
> Seems like a big issue is I'm guessing insistence on having this be a solo operation for cultural reasons
What cultures are you aware of that do pair programming for poopies?
moduspol 8 hours ago [-]
I'm thinking more like Player 2 just operates a shop vac and aims the nozzle at the appropriate area.
Though I guess if that would work, they'd just use those loud suction toilets they use on airplanes.
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
Shop vac tube would be gross fast and need regular maintenance. Dog poop bag is entirely disposable. Throw it behind the spacecraft and use it as propulsion.
outworlder 15 hours ago [-]
> Seems like a big issue is I'm guessing insistence on having this be a solo operation for cultural reasons.
I had to do some stool collection and it took every ounce of willpower and a N95 mask to prevent me from vomiting everywhere. And that was my poop. I think it's more than cultural, there's a strong visceral reaction.
On the other hand, I can pickup my dog's poop no problem.
Nurses are heroes.
pbhjpbhj 10 hours ago [-]
Having an repulsion for shit is a healthy adaptation. But it seems that for some people they're much more sensitive.
Similarly, it's probably useful for a primitive person to vomit on sight of a familiar person vomiting, collective protection. Definitely a trait to find out before going to space!
mikkupikku 9 hours ago [-]
The one I've never got is how so many people faint or become I'll when they see blood. Always seemed like a massive maladaptive that should create even more risk in a presumably dangerous situation. If a tiger attacks me in the night and the guy next to me faints because I'm getting eaten, we'll both end up dying.
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
Rival tribe comes and kills Lug and Glug. You faint at seeing the bloodshed. They assume you died. They leave. You live and pass on your fainting genes.
Alternatively it could just be an overshoot of the behavior to recognize that you bleeding is a dangerous situation. These behaviors probably follow some gaussian distribution in their potential "effect" among the population and fainters are on a long tail of that distribution.
the_af 6 hours ago [-]
It seems maladaptive. I faint (sometimes) at the sight of my own blood, and must look away when nurses draw it. I also get queasy when even talking about blood or reading about it. I can't think of any good reason this would be helpful; in fact keeping my cool would be advantageous.
And yes, I do have a very vivid imagination.
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
Take a couple proper cowpies over the waterline and you will get over that fast.
riffraff 15 hours ago [-]
But parents do that all the time with babies.
It is disgusting (I hated doing it) but you get somewhat used to it relatively quickly.
the_af 6 hours ago [-]
We seem to make a disconnect with our own children. I certainly did. But it doesn't extend to even other people's kids!
itintheory 6 hours ago [-]
> But it doesn't extend to even other people's kids!
I think it's a question of exposure and tolerance, otherwise it'd be much harder for daycare workers, for instance.
madaxe_again 5 hours ago [-]
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vidarh 14 hours ago [-]
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Marha01 12 hours ago [-]
> Seems like a big issue is I'm guessing insistence on having this be a solo operation for cultural reasons.
Hmm... perhaps train a robot arm to do it?
yoz-y 15 hours ago [-]
Do they eat things that will 100% avoid liquid stool?
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
If it was liquid it would probably blow straight into the bag. In my experience there is quite a big of propulsion there. Enough to overcome gravity here on earth at least and spray dead horizontal.
alfiedotwtf 18 hours ago [-]
I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut, but yeah… pass.
Weird a silicon-like pants that strapped up so there was no leaks (like fisherman’s pants), that has a vacuum you attach (almost catheter style) isn’t used. Actually now that I think about it, it’s weird that astronauts aren’t using catheters 24/7!
NooneAtAll3 17 hours ago [-]
catheters are very uncomfortable
also apparently an infection risk
gcanyon 10 hours ago [-]
More like an infection certainty. Don't ask me how I know :-(
XorNot 17 hours ago [-]
I mean this has also been a problem for fighter pilots as well. The "piddle packs" for F-16 pilots are implicared at least one crash due to the complexity of using them.
Doing barrel roll, twist and speed up - radio to airliner „see buddy can you do that?”
Airliner „wait a moment” - some time passes nothing happens - airliner „hey buddy you seen that?” - f16 „what? Nothing happened” - airliner „I went to toilet on the back, took dump, made myself a coffee and strolled back to cockpit”.
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
Surprised they don't just let them piss on the seat like the bike leg in triathlon
5 hours ago [-]
the_af 6 hours ago [-]
Forget about pee, I always wondered about fighter pilots in one of those long, multi-hour flights, what happens if they really need to go number 2? I suppose they self-select as people without this kind of problems, but it can happen to anyone really.
I suppose in an emergency they just shit their pants, but I wonder what the ground crew says when they touch down.
scarier 6 hours ago [-]
Honestly this isn't something people select for at all--by the time you've made it through that many rounds of selection you aren't going to let GI issues keep you from the finish. I've heard of some creative solutions to the problem involving safing the ejection seat and getting out of your gear, but I don't really believe any of them. If you think it's a significant risk, you basically have two options: talk to the squadron flight surgeon and get medically grounded, or wear a diaper. Almost everyone is too proud to do either of those things, so a number of pilots have call signs related to shitting themselves in flight. Yes, everyone will make fun of you after the fact--if you're a decent person, you'll at least clean out the cockpit yourself.
WalterBright 5 hours ago [-]
I suppose you could avoid eating hours before a mission, and not eat gassy foods.
mr_toad 25 minutes ago [-]
in WWII they had to avoid serving gassy foods to bomber crews because at high altitudes intestinal issues could go from uncomfortable to lethal.
scarier 3 hours ago [-]
That's one option, although for longer missions your preparation generally needs to start the night before and I wouldn't recommend flying on an empty stomach (unless it works for you, but it makes most people more susceptible to airsickness). There isn't one consistent method that works for everyone--I think the book Sled Driver has a section where they talk about physiological preparation for SR-71 flights, and the only consistent habit the crew had was NOT eating the "traditional," low-residue steak-and-eggs breakfast.
Good news for gassy food lovers is the cabin pressure changes make everyone fart, there's no one else in the cockpit to hear or smell you, and even if there was it'd be loud and they'd be wearing an oxygen mask. Little victories.
the_af 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder if hunger can affect your focus and reflexes though.
WalterBright 3 hours ago [-]
If missing a meal causes that, I suspect we would have died out as a species long ago.
somenameforme 14 hours ago [-]
Apollo was largely driven with the purpose of achieving the goal rather than obsessing on the details on the way to that goal. In fact during Apollo they even completely scrapped mathematical risk modeling because the results it always gave were basically 'you die.'
So for instance a relevant and famous anecdote is that the original tests for Apollo launches didn't have any sort of urine/fecal disposal systems at all. In one delayed launch during testing Alan Shepard was in the capsule for hours and ended up needing to go pee. He asked for permission to depart the capsule, but that was declined to keep it all on track. So he ended up having to just pee all over himself in the suit.
Another piss poor anecdote is Buzz Aldrin on the Moon! When he departed the lunar lander capsule, the impact ended up breaking the urine collection device inside his suit. So his journey on the Moon involved having a healthy dose of urine sloshing around in his boot where it settled.
Of course there's a balance in all things. It's not like they just YOLO'd their way to the Moon. But things where the worst case outcome would be astronaut discomfort were seen as extremely low priority. In the original design, the capsule didn't even have a window or manual controls. So the astronauts were basically just being treated like human Laikas. They had to fight just to get those 'features.'
---
I think a big part of the reason for this is because there are basically infinite things that can go wrong. And so if you obsess on getting every single thing right, you'll end up never doing anything at all. In 1962 Kennedy gave his famous 'to the Moon' speech. At that time, we'd only just barely put the first man in orbit but had never done anything beyond that, at all. Just 7 years later a man would walk on the Moon. In modern times we've been basically trying to recreate what we did in the 60s, and spent decades doing so. And this obsession on the details is certainly a big part of the reason why.
ordu 11 hours ago [-]
> In fact during Apollo they even completely scrapped mathematical risk modeling because the results it always gave were basically 'you die.'
In hindsight we know, that these models were wrong. people were better at predicting risks without relying on formal models. I mean, people were not perfect too, but still they were better. I wonder, if modern engineering has better tools for risk modeling and how good they worked if they were used for Apollo. I mean, if we remove the knowledge specific for space flight, leave only the abstract theory of risk modelling, and then use a time-travel machine to send it to NASA at 1960 or so, could NASA employ modern risk modeling tools to get results on par (or better) to human intuition?
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> In hindsight we know, that these models were wrong
The number of near misses and actual deaths in the Apollo programme loosely indicate the models were right. We just had to up our risk threshold to make the Moon with the era’s technology.
Brian_K_White 9 hours ago [-]
People joke about "safety third" but I've always thought that was literally about right. It's a higher priority than many other considerations, but it's no way the highest priority. Doing or having something at all absolutely comes before having it in safety and comfort.
ErroneousBosh 12 hours ago [-]
> In fact during Apollo they even completely scrapped mathematical risk modeling because the results it always gave were basically 'you die.'
I've had a similar conversation with the "but if we really went to the Moon in 1969 why has it taken so long to be able to do it again" folk a few times.
The real answer is of course that we did it once, and realised that a project where about 99% of the failure modes are "astronauts turn into a rapidly expanding cloud of fried mince" and all of these failure modes are incredibly likely was not something we really wanted to do again.
You only get ~30 seconds of zero G. How would that work?
YeGoblynQueenne 21 hours ago [-]
Hold it in for three days. Then you're ready to go in a flash.
dlcarrier 21 hours ago [-]
That would probably make it take longer. A safer bet would be three really strong cups of coffee and two bran muffins.
spike021 20 hours ago [-]
or get someone who's lactose intolerant and make them drink a carton of milk.
__MatrixMan__ 20 hours ago [-]
Perhaps buoyancy could be a decent substitute, at least for the solid waste part. I imagine being waist deep and flushing the entire bathroom after each training session. Maybe some kind of spatula/squeegee might assist with separation, coupled with a robotic spatula cleaner and sanitizer. There would be a monitor and cameras so you could calibrate your aim. What an odd workday that would be.
20 hours ago [-]
throwaway173738 19 hours ago [-]
buoyancy only applies in gravity. The buoyant force on an object is equal to and opposite of the weight of the displaced fluid. No gravity, no weight.
pulvinar 17 hours ago [-]
The goal here is neutral buoyancy when in gravity so that it behaves as though there were no gravity. Put a bag of water in water and it floats like the rest of the water, gravity or no.
malfist 8 hours ago [-]
Neutral buoyancy is achieved with very specific densities. You can either make the astronaut buoyant, or you can make the poop, but not both at the same time.
__MatrixMan__ 28 minutes ago [-]
Do you need both? I assumed the astronaut has a handle or strap or something to fix their reference frame to the toilet. They can be only partially submerged.
RataNova 9 hours ago [-]
How much of aerospace design used to treat the crew as an adapter bolted onto the machine
Alupis 24 hours ago [-]
Listening to the live stream yesterday evening - they performed a significant amount of troubleshooting for the toilet. This required consulting with a full team of experts, including a "Toilet Lead". It seems it wasn't "flushing" waste into the collection bag or something similar - but they were eventually able to get it working.
I found the language NASA and the astronauts used to communicate absolutely hilarious - "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!"
Glad they got it working - best of luck to Atemis II mission!
NooneAtAll3 17 hours ago [-]
> "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!"
corporate talk on a public science mission :/
muvlon 11 hours ago [-]
This doesn't register as corpo talk to me, more tongue-in-cheek nerdy mission control talk. See also "rapid unscheduled disassembly".
khazhoux 15 hours ago [-]
I hope they remember to cut the mics during the fluid disposal event
Apparently the way they got it working was to power cycle the toilet.
throwaway5465 14 hours ago [-]
It needed more than a flush.
/ducks
kube-system 16 hours ago [-]
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AlexDragusin 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe it was doing updates... /s
etskinner 13 hours ago [-]
I especially liked the part where mission control referred to using the toilet as "donation"
whackernews 22 hours ago [-]
I love this. No matter what we do and how far we push the limits of humanity, we still have to shit.
api 19 hours ago [-]
The second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything poops.
Anything alive that is using energy and doing work and transforming matter must poop in some form or another.
We don’t know what form life out there might take, but we know it poops.
Even post biological machine life would poop in the form of industrial waste, waste heat, etc.
Even near perfect recycling can only be near perfect, not perfect, due to the second law, which means a super efficient organism or closed cycle ecosystem or industry will still poop. Just not much. It will also emit a ton of waste heat, which I guess is kind of poop since mass and energy are ultimately equivalent.
If there’s weird life out there made of plasma or something, it poops. Probably charged particles or something.
The monolith in 2001? It poops. Somehow.
NooneAtAll3 17 hours ago [-]
can't you have life that dies before it poops?
"death before dishonor" xD
dotancohen 16 hours ago [-]
Whatever eats that thing has to deal with the waste that it stores.
Wonderful defense mechanism.
api 8 hours ago [-]
In that case the corpse is the poop. There are insects whose adult stages do this.
rossant 15 hours ago [-]
I had the same realization lately. Shouldn't it be said more specifically that anything that consumes matter to turn it into energy (as all living things on Earth) must poop? If we make the distinction between mass and energy of course.
beAbU 14 hours ago [-]
No I think that "everything poops" is absolutely perfect. Poop is entropy, and everything turns into entropy eventually.
It might not be traditional poop as we know it, but the point is, no matter how far we go one day, no matter what/who we meet out there, no matter how much we advance, there will always be waste to manage.
Waste might be literal poop, waste heat, spent uranium, used oil, slag from a smelter or whatever. We might be perfect recyclers one day, and we might repurpose almost everything, but there will always be a little bit of "poop" left over to manage.
api 8 hours ago [-]
Years ago I read about an actual scientific proposal to look for UFOs. A few people in the UFO scene with scientific backgrounds were trying to crowdfund it.
The idea was to place very sensitive wide angle infrared telescopes at remote locations that are UFO sighting hot spots. Because as long as physics is universal anything flying around, especially like supposed alien craft, must be using a lot of power and rejecting tons of waste heat. They’d have to light up very bright in IR and physics says there’s nothing you can do about it (unless you imagine wild ideas like dumping it into another multiverse slice).
You’d get lots of planes but you could cross reference against public data to remove most of those. And obviously something doing maneuvers that are aerodynamically impossible or would turn a human into strawberry jam is not a plane.
I thought it was a good idea but I don’t think it got funded. It was years ago so the tech might have been very expensive. I bet it would be cheaper now. IMO it would be a good low cost but high payoff experiment.
lebuffon 18 hours ago [-]
... and we seem to be unable to make something that works without "turning it off and turning it on again" :-)
RataNova 9 hours ago [-]
Nothing says "this is real engineering" like discovering that even the bathroom has a dedicated expert and a troubleshooting playbook
azalemeth 23 hours ago [-]
Toileting is really fecking important. As someone with a spinal injury you really don't realise just how important until it goes wrong.
Apparently one of the down sides about the previous system was that the separation of solid and liquid excreta ideally required someone to separate their excretion of both kinds. Apparently this is something that male astronauts found much much easier than female ones. Artemis's toilet can handle both at the same time.
I wonder what would happen if they just stood in the bathroom and spun in circles with their suit flap open while they were evacuating. Would it float far enough away fast enough due to centrifugal force for them to be able to catch it with the bag on the backspin, before crashing into the walls of the bathroom?
userbinator 17 hours ago [-]
More like turn them both into a liquid.
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
Nah, the solids would crash out to the bottom of the tube.
amelius 23 hours ago [-]
> separation of solid and liquid excreta
this invention might be of use in livestock farming.
bluGill 21 hours ago [-]
Livestock farmers have been doing this for decades. However they have very different constraints. It doesn't matter if a little of one gets mixed with the other - in fact they need enough water in the solids for proper decomposition. Both are normally pumped as well, so the solids are generally expected to be more a viscous liquid than actual solids. They don't want too much water in some stages, but they have plenty of room for a large setteling tank (read gravity works for them). They are also dealing with far more waste than a space mission, so they need something that is efficient/cheap at quantity.
OJFord 23 hours ago [-]
GP is saying that was previously required, not that it was invented. The new one can handle the mixture; not necessarily (presumably not?) by separating it.
faster 24 hours ago [-]
I worked on the shuttle for a summer a long time ago, and my group's admin was obsessed with the toilet plumbing so she had engineers stopping by with specs and diagrams a few times per week. True story: there was a component in the liquid waste system called the "last drop pinch tube". She laughed about that for weeks.
JumpCrisscross 2 days ago [-]
This is one of those stupid, unglamorous works that legitimately facilitates long-term space exploration ambitions in a way just focusing on the sexy bits, e.g. propulsion.
giantrobot 23 hours ago [-]
I gauge the seriousness of all manned space exploration proposals by the attention paid to the toilets. If the toilets are not a solved problem with many nines of reliability, you're just writing science function and are not at all serious about actual manned space exploration. Toilets are the brown M&M clause[0] of manned spaceflight proposals.
Toilets are unglamorous in the extreme but absolutely vital. Humans make hazardous and potentially deadly waste. Every day. It needs to be safely discarded/contained. In a sealed environment in microgravity it's even more dangerous than it is on Earth.
Aerosolized fecal matter can enter the lungs and cause deadly infections. Entering the digestive system can cause debilitating (possibly deadly) illness. Temporary blindness if it gets in the eyes. It can also cause mechanical or electrical problems if it gets in equipment. All of these can lead to a mission failure and in extreme instances a total loss of the crew. Apollo 8 was extremely lucky that Frank Borman's illness didn't cause more problems.
If you're not thinking logistics and infrastructure you're not really serious about an endeavor.
I have seen engineering shops where the conversation about fixing some small but simple thing before a deadline gets filed into "better to give the consultants reviewing this some low hanging fruit for the snag list."
Frankly this is true about Earth too. Not enough effort is spent wisely managing human waste, and many people die as a result.
XorNot 17 hours ago [-]
Municipal plumbing is one of the wonders of the modern world and I appreciate it every time I use it.
mmooss 22 hours ago [-]
I see your point. Out of curiosity:
> In a sealed environment in microgravity it's even more dangerous than it is on Earth. / Aerosolized fecal matter can enter the lungs and cause deadly infections.
Would the air filtration / recycling system minimize this risk?
giantrobot 22 hours ago [-]
The air filtration will actually help spread aerosols because air currents will carry them through the cabin before they're captured by a filter.
A high power "eliminate aerosols" mode would be one of those infrastructure things that need to be designed (and tested). Even then a single compartment spacecraft like the Orion or Dragon wouldn't have anywhere for the crew to bivouac while some aerosol evacuation mode was active. So you'd want a whole procedure designed around it.
Part of the need for the Apollo Constant Wear Garments was to make up for the lack of faculties in the command module and LEM. Such a thing would be impractical for a long duration mission so toilets (and waste disposal in general) need to be a reliably solved problem.
api 19 hours ago [-]
I could imagine the belters in The Expanse just throwing on suits and venting. Of course that only works if you have a bunch of canned air or something that makes it by cracking minerals on board.
mmooss 22 hours ago [-]
Good points. A few hot takes:
> The air filtration will actually help spread aerosols because air currents will carry them through the cabin before they're captured by a filter.
The toilet facilities could have input / suction into the air filtration system. Maybe wise anyway.
> A high power "eliminate aerosols" mode would be one of those infrastructure things that need to be designed (and tested).
I expect the technology is mature in industrial settings, though of course that is much different than microgravity and the constrained resources of the spacecraft. Maybe it exists on the space station? That context still seems significantly different.
> a single compartment spacecraft like the Orion or Dragon wouldn't have anywhere for the crew to bivouac
In their spacesuits, though their exteriors may need decontamination. Maybe they just go outside, though probably not a great idea to have the entire crew outside the spacecraft simultaneously! Maybe in an emergency.
giantrobot 16 hours ago [-]
The Space Shuttle and ISS (and Orion) had/have microgravity toilets. They have some active suction and spinning tines that push the material against the walls of the containment vessel. The ISS toilet has changeable waste containers that are dumped in the unmanned supply capsules.
The Space Shuttle's toilet was just cleaned during servicing after a mission. The Shuttle had a max flight duration of about two weeks so there wasn't a need to have changeable waste containers.
In the case a toilet catastrophically malfunctions in microgravity imagine a snow globe. Whatever way you want to filter out the "snow"...it's going to land on everything inside.
In the most literal sense shit is serious in space.
api 19 hours ago [-]
Speaking of this: let’s talk about space settlement.
If you’re going to stay, you are going to be having babies.
Any tech tree proposal for a space settlement (planet, moon, spin stations, whatever) that does not address how to make and reuse or recycle diapers is not serious.
I never see this mentioned in sci-fi or in space nerd discourse around stuff like what you need to settle Mars. It’s up there with potable water, at least if you want humans to reproduce.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> If you’re going to stay, you are going to be having babies
This is a hurdle for settlement. Not exploration. Toilets are a hurdle for exploration, as is trauma medicine.
I’m not dismissing the need to do experiments with pregnant rats on the Moon. But until we’re dealing with multi-year missions on Mars, gestation isn’t on the Gantt chart.
> I never see this mentioned in sci-fi
The Expanse and A City on Mars speak to this precisely and extensively.
mememememememo 1 days ago [-]
It is the plumbing, not the porcelain.
trhway 23 hours ago [-]
a good attempt at popularization of the issue in Big Bang Theory
I couldn't stop thinking about the complicated U-boat toilet to allow discharging waste while submerged. One set off a chain of events that lead to its ship's demise. Someone decided to use it without consulting the toilet technician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-1206
13 hours ago [-]
detourdog 23 hours ago [-]
One of the good laughs I had watching 2001 was Haywood reading the instructions for the toilet. The joke being we have evolved to the point that our most basic human functions has become complex.
Cool article, nice sleuthing. Could be straight out of the “Typeset in the Future” book!
kodablah 4 hours ago [-]
It is also in that book, page 36/37, with transcription and minor note on issues with ISS toilets in 2008.
idatum 22 hours ago [-]
Haywood reads anxiously! Memorable scene.
detourdog 21 hours ago [-]
High stakes situation:)
beloch 22 hours ago [-]
Reduced need for waste disposal is one of the mixed blessings of a steady diet of MRE's (sometimes called "Meals Refusing to Exit"). It's sobering to realize that anyone who has ever set foot on the moon was most likely backed up in a bad way when they stepped out of their LEM.
Marsymars 21 hours ago [-]
I always get a kick out of the "low residue diet" descriptor.
asdff 20 hours ago [-]
Aren't they like 2000 calories? I feel like I would be begging the medic for laxatives. Must feel like a 5 mile freight train stuck in a 1 mile tunnel.
furyofantares 24 hours ago [-]
I just tuned into the NASA live stream after this and the first, and only, thing I've heard is "we've had a successful ejection. toilet is go for use"
ricardobeat 13 hours ago [-]
A thought: is the ejected space poop going to continue to travel in space at 15000km/h and eventually drop into the sun, or will it also be captured by gravity and land on the moon?
gattr 11 hours ago [-]
Delta-v relative to the Orion is probably not that big, so I guess the waste will also circle the Moon and follow the crew into Earth's atmosphere.
cguess 8 hours ago [-]
Urine is ejected, solids are collected and returned to earth.
According to science, the detritivore always prefer a polished turd. =3
vova_hn2 13 hours ago [-]
I remember some old sci-fi book or short story (don't remember which one) that had a spaceship with a separate spinning section specifically for a toilet.
You would enter it, activate it, wait until it accelerated to a certain RPM, do the thing, then deactivate it and it would decelerate until it is stationary relative to the rest of the ship again.
I wonder, how expensive it would be to build this for real.
The rotation mechanism could use a flywheel. Let's say, an electric motor spins the toilet section and the flywheel in opposite directions. So that the rest of the ship is not disturbed.
Size and weight are obviously issues, I just wonder how much would be the overhead. I wonder if the real spaceship designers considered this possibility.
yanko 21 hours ago [-]
There is interesting exact timing for (first attempt for sure) the noise of getting humans round trip around the moon, that space toilet discussion and the shitty situation with aircraft carriers in failed war with Iran.
alexandrehtrb 3 hours ago [-]
Fun fact: during the development of The Sims 1, the first object created was the toilet.
sparshselim 14 hours ago [-]
i had a realisation reading this story, the NASA report and the apollo transcripts. very often i use the shorthand, "oh but this is not rocket science" & "if we can go to the moon, this is easy stuff." i think this same approach led to us designing thermodynamically & aeronautically elegant machines, but completing screwing up something as basic as a toilet.
toilets are as important as rockets. and oftentimes because they're unsexy, more difficult to solve for. after all, i remember neil armstrong, but not the person who made this modern amenity in my own household.
what a wild rabbit hole
agency 20 hours ago [-]
I can't believe no one has brought up the legendary Apollo 10 "turd incident" https://archive.ph/J61jD
nosrepa 20 hours ago [-]
Probably since the article specifically mentions it!
JKCalhoun 8 hours ago [-]
Had to laugh: "Artemis II’s toilet is a moon mission milestone" and the first photo has a sign "Lets Go!" in front of Artemis.
gcanyon 24 hours ago [-]
They should have trained plumbers to be astronauts instead of training astronauts to be plumbers. (Armageddon reference)
But seriously, although I guess it’s fair to say that errors will occur, still: they couldn’t get the plumbing right?
fwipsy 22 hours ago [-]
It's so ironic reading about all of the Orion heat shield engineering problems but at least they have a groundbreaking new toilet!!
spiderice 19 hours ago [-]
Yes they pulled engineers off the heat shield to engineer the toilet. That is totally how it works.
fwipsy 17 hours ago [-]
Are you sure? I wouldn't have thought the skills would be transferable. I don't mean to judge, but I think if your toilet needs heat shield engineers, maybe you should see your doctor.
etskinner 9 hours ago [-]
Grandparent comment was being sarcastic
fwipsy 7 hours ago [-]
Wow I'm just learning so much today. First I learned that heat shield engineers can work on space toilets, now someone is teaching me about sarcasm. It's great how everyone here on HN is so dedicated to teaching me things.
joshstrange 1 days ago [-]
While space has always interested me quite a bit, I've never looked into the toilet situation and I had this scene [0] from an unrealistic kids movie firmly fixed in my brain as "this is how they use the restroom in space, or something better since that movie is old".
I always think of Apollo 13 (the movie): oh look, constellation u-rine
themafia 24 hours ago [-]
> Early toilets on both the space shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS) used this vacuum system
For liquid waste. This was not exactly the case for solid waste. Effectively it was just a tank. It had something like a "net" in it, this was connected to a shaft, through a gear, to another shaft at the front of the seat. The commander would, every 7 days or so, "actuate the mechanism" to rotate the net and to gather all the waste and compact it into one side of the toilet.
Many commanders said this was the most stressful part of the mission as the mechanism was somewhat delicate and could easily break. In that case you had to don a glove and manually do the work the net was otherwise doing.
If that completely failed, yes, the shuttle had backup "Apollo bags" stored in the middeck lockers.
convexly 22 hours ago [-]
All the advanced engineering in the world and you still need to figure out how a toilet works in zero gravity.
NetMageSCW 21 hours ago [-]
I wish there had been some comparison to how the Dragon toilet works.
lorenzohess 21 hours ago [-]
And people say there's no innovation in the Artemis stack
shiroiuma 15 hours ago [-]
From what I've read, the crew capsule really is all-new and very different from previous NASA capsules. However the engines and other launch stuff is just reused old stuff or a little modernized (SRS main engines + SRBs).
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> the engines and other launch stuff is just reused old stuff or a little modernized (SRS main engines + SRBs)
Which is good enough. The breakthrough propulsion is happening for Artemis III at the SpaceX and Blue Origin shipyards.
cubefox 18 hours ago [-]
What a frustrating article. It contains a lot of unimportant chitchat but basically no information on how the toilet actually works.
smrt 13 hours ago [-]
(It’s interesting, there’s no mention of AI in this thread anywhere)
felipellrocha 6 hours ago [-]
Howard?! Is that you?!
ericpauley 2 days ago [-]
Thoroughly enjoyed reading this, especially the author’s repeated obsession on the door vs. curtain innovation…
acyou 16 hours ago [-]
Uh oh, that toilet looks pretty heavy, how much does that thing weigh? Will the extra weight be worth it during reentry? Or will the crew push the whole thing out the airlock on the way home?
I wondered why the Artemis crew module weighs twice as much as the Apollo module after 60 years of scientific progress and developments in materials science and aerospace engineering, now I am starting to understand. Plastic bags "worked", not great but they are super light, essentially you are not going to get much lighter than a plastic bag for containing and disposing of waste. On the other hand, that toilet looks insanely overbuilt, how strong do you need the seat to be??
Maybe they can position the astronauts behind it for use as a last-ditch heat shield.
This story reminds be of the tale where during the space race the Americans created a super space pen that works in zero degrees kelvin and vacuum, and the Russians used a pencil.
Feathercrown 13 hours ago [-]
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but weren't pencils ruled out by NASA because of the dust they create when they write? The toilet engineering could be a similar situation. These people are professionals, we should not assume they built it like this for no reason.
manarth 8 hours ago [-]
My secondary school physics teacher was somewhat accommodating to "interesting" experiments - those which might look cool to teenagers whilst also providing a lesson in physics.
One of those was attaching electrical probes to each end of a pencil, and applying an electrical current. Graphite conducts extremely well: the pencil "lead" (actually graphite) heats up, glowing a bright orange colour, whilst setting fire to the wooden pencil surrounds. If you snap the graphite "lead", you can touch the two ends together causing a bright electrical arc.
It's a great physics demonstration, and graphite conductivity is the reason pencils aren't used in zero-gravity environments.
imtringued 11 hours ago [-]
The dust while writing doesn't matter. You can still write with a rounded tip. The problem is sharpening the pencil.
23 hours ago [-]
gcanyon 10 hours ago [-]
Every time early astronaut relief comes up (it's come up two or three times, which is more nickels than I would have expected) I see this line:
> being able to pee and poop simultaneously
... and I know that I could never have been an astronaut. There are many other reasons, but the ability to hold one while doing the other... yeah, I'm out.
cringleyrobert 5 hours ago [-]
Hoooooowwwwwward!!
throwpppp 15 hours ago [-]
Millions of homeless don't have access to a normal toilet. Well done america
khazhoux 15 hours ago [-]
When you gotta boldly go, you gotta boldly go!
RataNova 9 hours ago [-]
A good reminder that standardization matters
fredgrott 23 hours ago [-]
and here I though they were talking about MS products....my bad...
throwfku 20 hours ago [-]
A lot of Americans don't have toilets but elite needs toilet for moon.
squibonpig 15 hours ago [-]
Astronauts aren't exactly the elite honestly. The elite would rather the money went to oil companies or something.
stickfigure 22 hours ago [-]
Great, but robots don't poop.
pbhjpbhj 22 hours ago [-]
Was that by Heinlein or Arthur C Clarke?
rzzzt 14 hours ago [-]
4th prime directive, remains classified until an executive of OCP reveals it to them.
ronb1964 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 21:26:31 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
"In general, the Apollo waste management system worked satisfactorily from an engineering standpoint. From the point of view of crew acceptance, however, the system must be given poor marks. The principal problem with both the urine and fecal collection systems was the fact that these required more manipulation than crewmen were used to in the Earth environment and were, as a consequence, found to be objectionable. The urine receptacle assembly represented an attempt to preclude crew handling of urine specimens but, because urine spills were frequent, the objective of “sanitizing” the process was thwarted.
The fecal collection system presented an even more distasteful set of problems. The collection process required a great deal of skill to preclude escape of feces from the collection bag and consequent soiling of the crew, their clothing, or cabin surfaces. The fecal collection process was, moreover, extremely time consuming because of the level of difficulty involved with use of the system. An Apollo 7 astronaut estimated the time required to correctly accomplish the process at 45 minutes.* Good placement of fecal bags was difficult to attain; this was further complicated by the fact that the flap at the back of the constant wear garment created an opening that was too small for easy placement of the bags.** As was noted earlier, kneading of the bags was required for dispersal of the germicide.
*Entry in the log of Apollo 7 by Astronaut Walter Cunningham.
**The configuration of the constant wear garments on later Apollo missions were modified to correct this problem."
1: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19760005603/downloads/19...
It sounds like that would have allowed them to fix the suit before they went?
They must have eaten the meals and such to be sure they could function, make sure they didn't have any intolerance, for example?
Of course, but the fundamental problem is that difficulties compound. It starts with: pooping is much harder when gravity isn't there to persistently tug on the turd. Something that is slightly obnoxious on Earth (using a bag, using a suit flap) turns into an absolute trainwreck when you have a bag, a suit flap, and turd separation failure. Now you have to do precise mechanical manipulation of an object you don't want to touch behind your back through a bag and a suit flap, every failure multiplies the work, and now the turds can float away to multiply the work outside your immediate vicinity. Ditto for kneading the antibacterial into the poo: if you fail to do this thoroughly on Earth, bacterial offgassing causes the bag to vent, but in all likelihood that's the end of it because you can arrange for gravity to keep the poo away from the vent. In fact, you would probably do this without even thinking or imagining how it could go wrong. In zero gravity, you can't simply arrange "vent on top, poo on bottom", so the event is likely to launch aerosolized poo into your living environment where you have to put up with it for the next few days.
It's difficult to fully appreciate gravity until it's gone.
Astronauts are heroes for the risks they take, but they are also heroes for dealing with this.
I remember seeing a Russian space toilet when they had it set up in the powerhouse museum in Sydney. It looked like a booth with a vaguely pubic area shaped vacuum attachment designed to be unisex. I stared at it for some time trying to work out how it worked. The Apollo system seems horrendous!
Women also started with a feminized version of the uncomfortable device and then switched to diapers, and then men followed.
It's possible there were no women on the design team but I don't think it's a case of bad masculinity.
But I know that air is also a limited resource on space so it can't be solely an "airline-like system"
(Also discarding it "outdoors" might be the best solution in the end)
What cultures are you aware of that do pair programming for poopies?
Though I guess if that would work, they'd just use those loud suction toilets they use on airplanes.
I had to do some stool collection and it took every ounce of willpower and a N95 mask to prevent me from vomiting everywhere. And that was my poop. I think it's more than cultural, there's a strong visceral reaction.
On the other hand, I can pickup my dog's poop no problem.
Nurses are heroes.
Similarly, it's probably useful for a primitive person to vomit on sight of a familiar person vomiting, collective protection. Definitely a trait to find out before going to space!
Alternatively it could just be an overshoot of the behavior to recognize that you bleeding is a dangerous situation. These behaviors probably follow some gaussian distribution in their potential "effect" among the population and fainters are on a long tail of that distribution.
And yes, I do have a very vivid imagination.
It is disgusting (I hated doing it) but you get somewhat used to it relatively quickly.
I think it's a question of exposure and tolerance, otherwise it'd be much harder for daycare workers, for instance.
Hmm... perhaps train a robot arm to do it?
Weird a silicon-like pants that strapped up so there was no leaks (like fisherman’s pants), that has a vacuum you attach (almost catheter style) isn’t used. Actually now that I think about it, it’s weird that astronauts aren’t using catheters 24/7!
also apparently an infection risk
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-23-me-542-st...
[1] (NSFW lyrics!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd9_RffdmBA
Doing barrel roll, twist and speed up - radio to airliner „see buddy can you do that?”
Airliner „wait a moment” - some time passes nothing happens - airliner „hey buddy you seen that?” - f16 „what? Nothing happened” - airliner „I went to toilet on the back, took dump, made myself a coffee and strolled back to cockpit”.
I suppose in an emergency they just shit their pants, but I wonder what the ground crew says when they touch down.
Good news for gassy food lovers is the cabin pressure changes make everyone fart, there's no one else in the cockpit to hear or smell you, and even if there was it'd be loud and they'd be wearing an oxygen mask. Little victories.
So for instance a relevant and famous anecdote is that the original tests for Apollo launches didn't have any sort of urine/fecal disposal systems at all. In one delayed launch during testing Alan Shepard was in the capsule for hours and ended up needing to go pee. He asked for permission to depart the capsule, but that was declined to keep it all on track. So he ended up having to just pee all over himself in the suit.
Another piss poor anecdote is Buzz Aldrin on the Moon! When he departed the lunar lander capsule, the impact ended up breaking the urine collection device inside his suit. So his journey on the Moon involved having a healthy dose of urine sloshing around in his boot where it settled.
Of course there's a balance in all things. It's not like they just YOLO'd their way to the Moon. But things where the worst case outcome would be astronaut discomfort were seen as extremely low priority. In the original design, the capsule didn't even have a window or manual controls. So the astronauts were basically just being treated like human Laikas. They had to fight just to get those 'features.'
---
I think a big part of the reason for this is because there are basically infinite things that can go wrong. And so if you obsess on getting every single thing right, you'll end up never doing anything at all. In 1962 Kennedy gave his famous 'to the Moon' speech. At that time, we'd only just barely put the first man in orbit but had never done anything beyond that, at all. Just 7 years later a man would walk on the Moon. In modern times we've been basically trying to recreate what we did in the 60s, and spent decades doing so. And this obsession on the details is certainly a big part of the reason why.
In hindsight we know, that these models were wrong. people were better at predicting risks without relying on formal models. I mean, people were not perfect too, but still they were better. I wonder, if modern engineering has better tools for risk modeling and how good they worked if they were used for Apollo. I mean, if we remove the knowledge specific for space flight, leave only the abstract theory of risk modelling, and then use a time-travel machine to send it to NASA at 1960 or so, could NASA employ modern risk modeling tools to get results on par (or better) to human intuition?
The number of near misses and actual deaths in the Apollo programme loosely indicate the models were right. We just had to up our risk threshold to make the Moon with the era’s technology.
I've had a similar conversation with the "but if we really went to the Moon in 1969 why has it taken so long to be able to do it again" folk a few times.
The real answer is of course that we did it once, and realised that a project where about 99% of the failure modes are "astronauts turn into a rapidly expanding cloud of fried mince" and all of these failure modes are incredibly likely was not something we really wanted to do again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced-gravity_aircraft
I found the language NASA and the astronauts used to communicate absolutely hilarious - "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!"
Glad they got it working - best of luck to Atemis II mission!
corporate talk on a public science mission :/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruCsYGL3QlY
/ducks
Anything alive that is using energy and doing work and transforming matter must poop in some form or another.
We don’t know what form life out there might take, but we know it poops.
Even post biological machine life would poop in the form of industrial waste, waste heat, etc.
Even near perfect recycling can only be near perfect, not perfect, due to the second law, which means a super efficient organism or closed cycle ecosystem or industry will still poop. Just not much. It will also emit a ton of waste heat, which I guess is kind of poop since mass and energy are ultimately equivalent.
If there’s weird life out there made of plasma or something, it poops. Probably charged particles or something.
The monolith in 2001? It poops. Somehow.
"death before dishonor" xD
Wonderful defense mechanism.
It might not be traditional poop as we know it, but the point is, no matter how far we go one day, no matter what/who we meet out there, no matter how much we advance, there will always be waste to manage.
Waste might be literal poop, waste heat, spent uranium, used oil, slag from a smelter or whatever. We might be perfect recyclers one day, and we might repurpose almost everything, but there will always be a little bit of "poop" left over to manage.
The idea was to place very sensitive wide angle infrared telescopes at remote locations that are UFO sighting hot spots. Because as long as physics is universal anything flying around, especially like supposed alien craft, must be using a lot of power and rejecting tons of waste heat. They’d have to light up very bright in IR and physics says there’s nothing you can do about it (unless you imagine wild ideas like dumping it into another multiverse slice).
You’d get lots of planes but you could cross reference against public data to remove most of those. And obviously something doing maneuvers that are aerodynamically impossible or would turn a human into strawberry jam is not a plane.
I thought it was a good idea but I don’t think it got funded. It was years ago so the tech might have been very expensive. I bet it would be cheaper now. IMO it would be a good low cost but high payoff experiment.
Apparently one of the down sides about the previous system was that the separation of solid and liquid excreta ideally required someone to separate their excretion of both kinds. Apparently this is something that male astronauts found much much easier than female ones. Artemis's toilet can handle both at the same time.
I still think they have the good old fashioned Maximum Absorbency Garment for space walks though. (CF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Absorbency_Garment)
this invention might be of use in livestock farming.
Toilets are unglamorous in the extreme but absolutely vital. Humans make hazardous and potentially deadly waste. Every day. It needs to be safely discarded/contained. In a sealed environment in microgravity it's even more dangerous than it is on Earth.
Aerosolized fecal matter can enter the lungs and cause deadly infections. Entering the digestive system can cause debilitating (possibly deadly) illness. Temporary blindness if it gets in the eyes. It can also cause mechanical or electrical problems if it gets in equipment. All of these can lead to a mission failure and in extreme instances a total loss of the crew. Apollo 8 was extremely lucky that Frank Borman's illness didn't cause more problems.
If you're not thinking logistics and infrastructure you're not really serious about an endeavor.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-did-van-hale...
I have seen engineering shops where the conversation about fixing some small but simple thing before a deadline gets filed into "better to give the consultants reviewing this some low hanging fruit for the snag list."
(0) Actual backstage contract riders for rock stars : https://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstage
> In a sealed environment in microgravity it's even more dangerous than it is on Earth. / Aerosolized fecal matter can enter the lungs and cause deadly infections.
Would the air filtration / recycling system minimize this risk?
A high power "eliminate aerosols" mode would be one of those infrastructure things that need to be designed (and tested). Even then a single compartment spacecraft like the Orion or Dragon wouldn't have anywhere for the crew to bivouac while some aerosol evacuation mode was active. So you'd want a whole procedure designed around it.
Part of the need for the Apollo Constant Wear Garments was to make up for the lack of faculties in the command module and LEM. Such a thing would be impractical for a long duration mission so toilets (and waste disposal in general) need to be a reliably solved problem.
> The air filtration will actually help spread aerosols because air currents will carry them through the cabin before they're captured by a filter.
The toilet facilities could have input / suction into the air filtration system. Maybe wise anyway.
> A high power "eliminate aerosols" mode would be one of those infrastructure things that need to be designed (and tested).
I expect the technology is mature in industrial settings, though of course that is much different than microgravity and the constrained resources of the spacecraft. Maybe it exists on the space station? That context still seems significantly different.
> a single compartment spacecraft like the Orion or Dragon wouldn't have anywhere for the crew to bivouac
In their spacesuits, though their exteriors may need decontamination. Maybe they just go outside, though probably not a great idea to have the entire crew outside the spacecraft simultaneously! Maybe in an emergency.
The Space Shuttle's toilet was just cleaned during servicing after a mission. The Shuttle had a max flight duration of about two weeks so there wasn't a need to have changeable waste containers.
In the case a toilet catastrophically malfunctions in microgravity imagine a snow globe. Whatever way you want to filter out the "snow"...it's going to land on everything inside.
In the most literal sense shit is serious in space.
If you’re going to stay, you are going to be having babies.
Any tech tree proposal for a space settlement (planet, moon, spin stations, whatever) that does not address how to make and reuse or recycle diapers is not serious.
I never see this mentioned in sci-fi or in space nerd discourse around stuff like what you need to settle Mars. It’s up there with potable water, at least if you want humans to reproduce.
This is a hurdle for settlement. Not exploration. Toilets are a hurdle for exploration, as is trauma medicine.
I’m not dismissing the need to do experiments with pregnant rats on the Moon. But until we’re dealing with multi-year missions on Mars, gestation isn’t on the Gantt chart.
> I never see this mentioned in sci-fi
The Expanse and A City on Mars speak to this precisely and extensively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrX3EmdKtRc
https://sites.google.com/site/theageofplastic3d/2001s-zero-g...
You would enter it, activate it, wait until it accelerated to a certain RPM, do the thing, then deactivate it and it would decelerate until it is stationary relative to the rest of the ship again.
I wonder, how expensive it would be to build this for real.
The rotation mechanism could use a flywheel. Let's say, an electric motor spins the toilet section and the flywheel in opposite directions. So that the rest of the ship is not disturbed.
Size and weight are obviously issues, I just wonder how much would be the overhead. I wonder if the real spaceship designers considered this possibility.
toilets are as important as rockets. and oftentimes because they're unsexy, more difficult to solve for. after all, i remember neil armstrong, but not the person who made this modern amenity in my own household.
what a wild rabbit hole
But seriously, although I guess it’s fair to say that errors will occur, still: they couldn’t get the plumbing right?
[0] https://youtu.be/pJQGJmYKWZ0?t=131
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Space_Shuttle_toilet...
For liquid waste. This was not exactly the case for solid waste. Effectively it was just a tank. It had something like a "net" in it, this was connected to a shaft, through a gear, to another shaft at the front of the seat. The commander would, every 7 days or so, "actuate the mechanism" to rotate the net and to gather all the waste and compact it into one side of the toilet.
Many commanders said this was the most stressful part of the mission as the mechanism was somewhat delicate and could easily break. In that case you had to don a glove and manually do the work the net was otherwise doing.
If that completely failed, yes, the shuttle had backup "Apollo bags" stored in the middeck lockers.
Which is good enough. The breakthrough propulsion is happening for Artemis III at the SpaceX and Blue Origin shipyards.
I wondered why the Artemis crew module weighs twice as much as the Apollo module after 60 years of scientific progress and developments in materials science and aerospace engineering, now I am starting to understand. Plastic bags "worked", not great but they are super light, essentially you are not going to get much lighter than a plastic bag for containing and disposing of waste. On the other hand, that toilet looks insanely overbuilt, how strong do you need the seat to be??
Maybe they can position the astronauts behind it for use as a last-ditch heat shield.
This story reminds be of the tale where during the space race the Americans created a super space pen that works in zero degrees kelvin and vacuum, and the Russians used a pencil.
One of those was attaching electrical probes to each end of a pencil, and applying an electrical current. Graphite conducts extremely well: the pencil "lead" (actually graphite) heats up, glowing a bright orange colour, whilst setting fire to the wooden pencil surrounds. If you snap the graphite "lead", you can touch the two ends together causing a bright electrical arc.
It's a great physics demonstration, and graphite conductivity is the reason pencils aren't used in zero-gravity environments.
> being able to pee and poop simultaneously
... and I know that I could never have been an astronaut. There are many other reasons, but the ability to hold one while doing the other... yeah, I'm out.