CNN
By Jackie Wattles, CNN
(CNN) — The four astronauts on the Artemis II mission currently hurtling through space have had a largely quiet journey so far. Very few in-flight issues have cropped up that could disrupt their peace of mind.
Except, that is, for the toilet.
The Artemis II crew’s 16.5-foot-wide (5-meter-wide) Orion capsule has a waste management-related problem that arose in the early hours of Saturday as Day 3 was winding down.
“It’s an issue with dumping the waste out of the toilet,” Artemis II Flight Director Judd Frieling told reporters Saturday morning. “And so it appears to me that we probably have some frozen urine in the vent line.”
The astronauts — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — were still fast asleep by midmorning nearly 200,000 miles (nearly 320,000 kilometers) from Earth as mission controllers continued to troubleshoot the issue. The goal is to warm up the frozen line in the hopes of getting the urine flowing again, allowing the waste management system to expel the waste outside the capsule and free up room in the system to allow the astronauts to begin using it again.
The process of venting the urine outside the capsule was a moment Koch also showed on camera briefly. The pee trickles by like glowing gems in the vacuum of space as it zooms by the Orion’s windows.
The crew also reported a burning smell coming from the bathroom, though mission controllers noted it was likely just the gasket material around the door.
But it’s not the crew’s first run-in with toilet troubles.
Shortly after launching to orbit from NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, the crew realized the toilet’s pump wasn’t working. Pumps are important and used for a variety of reasons, including assisting with pulling waste from the body. In space, there is no gravity to assist with such expulsions.
That problem had a relatively straightforward fix: The crewmembers simply hadn’t put in enough water to prime the pump. After they topped that off, the system began functioning as intended.
The astronauts celebrated that small victory on Thursday during a virtual interview with news media.
“I’m proud to call myself the space plumber,” Koch said. “We were all breathing a sigh of relief when it turned out to be just fine. We did originally think that there could have been potentially something fouling up the motor.
“Luckily, we are all systems go,” she said.
‘The most important piece of equipment’
The onboard toilet is perhaps the spaceflight amenity held most dear to astronauts who value creature comforts.
“I like to say that it is probably the most important piece of equipment on board,” Koch added during her Thursday dispatch from Orion.
With the Orion toilet malfunctioning, the astronauts are resorting to a technique employed by the deep-space explorers of the mid-20th century.
In the Apollo era, astronauts did not have a toilet. They relied solely on bags to relieve themselves.
And the process was not always error-free. During the 1969 Apollo 10 mission — the one in which Thomas Stafford, John Young and Eugene Cernan circumnavigated the moon — Stafford reported back to mission control on Day 6 of the mission that a piece of waste was floating through the cabin, according to once-confidential government documents.
“Give me a napkin, quick,” Stafford was recorded saying a few minutes before Cernan spots more: “Here’s another goddamn turd.”
The astronauts famously hated the bagged-poop approach.
“The fecal bag system was marginally functional and was described as very ‘distasteful’ by the crew,” an official NASA report from 2007 later revealed. “The bags provided no odor control in the small capsule and the odor was prominent.”
The Orion crew is relying on a similar system right now that’s formally referred to as the the Collapsable Contingency Urinal or CCU. Astronaut Don Pettit, following along with the mission from home, shared an image on his social media feed.
Orion’s legacy
The Apollo 10 capsule wasn’t the only one plagued with toilet issues. The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which notched its first astronaut mission in 2020 and has flown more than a dozen since, also had several hiccups with its hygiene system.
During a Crew Dragon flight in 2021, for example, SpaceX found that a tube used to funnel urine into a storage tank became unglued, causing a leaky mess beneath the capsule’s floor. That forced the astronauts to rely on backup undergarments — which are essentially adult diapers.
The current NASA administrator, billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, also commissioned a three-day flight aboard Crew Dragon in 2022, called Inspiration4. During the spaceflight, he had to troubleshoot an onboard toilet problem. The issue, however, did not involve wayward waste floating around the cabin, Isaacman told CNN at the time.
Decades of toilet development informed the system aboard Orion that the Artemis II astronauts are using. NASA put a similar system on board the International Space Station — which orbits just a couple hundred miles above Earth — to help vet the technology.
Collins Aerospace holds a roughly $30 million contract, inked in 2015, to design and adapt the technology, known as the Universal Waste Management System or UWMS, for Orion.
And the system also builds on decades of the Space Shuttle program’s toilet technology. On both systems, urine is vented outside the capsule while solid waste is compacted and returned home with the crew.
When it functions, the in-space toilet can have its advantages.
“One of my friends has even said he prefers the toilet in space to the one on Earth,” former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino told CNN.
Massimino isn’t so sure, however. “I really miss my toilet on Earth because it’s very involved in space, and you have to be careful and respect your friends so that you don’t leave a mess,” he said. “And always clean up after yourself because you don’t want people to get sick.”
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