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."
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
1: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19760005603/downloads/19...
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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)
> 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?
> 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.
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.
Do they eat things that will 100% avoid liquid stool?
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!
catheters are very uncomfortable
also apparently an infection risk
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.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-23-me-542-st...
To be fair they're pretty easy to use as long as you don't have to fly an airplane at the same time...
[1] (NSFW lyrics!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd9_RffdmBA
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.
> 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.
How do you simulate zero gravity on earth?
Reduced gravity aircraft. AKA the Vomit Comet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced-gravity_aircraft
You only get ~30 seconds of zero G. How would that work?
Hold it in for three days. Then you're ready to go in a flash.
That would probably make it take longer. A safer bet would be three really strong cups of coffee and two bran muffins.
or get someone who's lactose intolerant and make them drink a carton of milk.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!"
corporate talk on a public science mission :/
I hope they remember to cut the mics during the fluid disposal event
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruCsYGL3QlY
Apparently the way they got it working was to power cycle the toilet.
It needed more than a flush.
/ducks
I especially liked the part where mission control referred to using the toilet as "donation"
I love this. No matter what we do and how far we push the limits of humanity, we still have to shit.
... and we seem to be unable to make something that works without "turning it off and turning it on again" :-)
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.
can't you have life that dies before it poops?
"death before dishonor" xD
Whatever eats that thing has to deal with the waste that it stores.
Wonderful defense mechanism.
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.
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.
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 still think they have the good old fashioned Maximum Absorbency Garment for space walks though. (CF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Absorbency_Garment)
Centrifuge would separate that stool and urine
More like turn them both into a liquid.
> separation of solid and liquid excreta
this invention might be of use in livestock farming.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-did-van-hale...
>toilets are the Brown M&M clause(0)
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
Frankly this is true about Earth too. Not enough effort is spent wisely managing human waste, and many people die as a result.
Municipal plumbing is one of the wonders of the modern world and I appreciate it every time I use it.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is the plumbing, not the porcelain.
a good attempt at popularization of the issue in Big Bang Theory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrX3EmdKtRc
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.
I always get a kick out of the "low residue diet" descriptor.
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.
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.
https://sites.google.com/site/theageofplastic3d/2001s-zero-g...
Cool article, nice sleuthing. Could be straight out of the “Typeset in the Future” book!
Haywood reads anxiously! Memorable scene.
High stakes situation:)
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"
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?
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
Relevantly, the Artemis 2 waste management system was non functional for a bit: https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/04/02/artemis-ii-fl...
Finally, some deshitification news on HN!
Very good. Great name as well.
According to science, the detritivore always prefer a polished turd. =3
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.
I can't believe no one has brought up the legendary Apollo 10 "turd incident" https://archive.ph/J61jD
Probably since the article specifically mentions it!
(It’s interesting, there’s no mention of AI in this thread anywhere)
It's so ironic reading about all of the Orion heat shield engineering problems but at least they have a groundbreaking new toilet!!
Yes they pulled engineers off the heat shield to engineer the toilet. That is totally how it works.
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.
Millions of homeless don't have access to a normal toilet. Well done america
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".
[0] https://youtu.be/pJQGJmYKWZ0?t=131
It wasn't actually that far off.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Space_Shuttle_toilet...
I always think of Apollo 13 (the movie): oh look, constellation u-rine
All the advanced engineering in the world and you still need to figure out how a toilet works in zero gravity.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
I wish there had been some comparison to how the Dragon toilet works.
And people say there's no innovation in the Artemis stack
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).
What a frustrating article. It contains a lot of unimportant chitchat but basically no information on how the toilet actually works.
Thoroughly enjoyed reading this, especially the author’s repeated obsession on the door vs. curtain innovation…
When you gotta boldly go, you gotta boldly go!
A lot of Americans don't have toilets but elite needs toilet for moon.
Astronauts aren't exactly the elite honestly. The elite would rather the money went to oil companies or something.
and here I though they were talking about MS products....my bad...
Great, but robots don't poop.
Was that by Heinlein or Arthur C Clarke?
4th prime directive, remains classified until an executive of OCP reveals it to them.