Humans are going to be heading back to the moon for the first time in decades. Thankfully, they won’t be doing it with Apollo-era restroom facilities. By that I mean, 21st-century lunar astronauts won’t be pooping into bags.
Sourced from a vlog published on YouTube by the Canadian Space Agency, astronauts will finally have something resembling a real earthly bathroom. It’ll be fully equipped with an actual toilet, something Apollo astronauts only dreamed of.
NASA’s Artemis II Astronauts Are Getting a Toilet Upgrade After Decades of Poop Bags
NASA’s Artemis 2 mission won’t be landing on the moon’s surface. It’s only slated for a 10-day lunar flyby, but it does still mark a monumental return to a place humans once golfed on in the name of science. It is a scientific and exploratory throwback, but with some major technological advancements.
Where Apollo astronauts had to poop into plastic bags and keep them in condom-like urine cuffs in full view of their crewmates, Artemis 2 replaces that outdated system with a compact “hygiene bay” inside the Orion capsule, which is itself a spacecraft roughly the size of two minivans, shared by four people. Under those circumstances, you can imagine that privacy would be key, especially considering it’s a mixed-gender team.
Gone are the poop bags and kept condoms; in their place are a small toilet, a series of privacy options, and, perhaps most triumphantly, an actual door. The bathroom, about the size of a small, very cramped closet, is outfitted with a series of handles to keep the floating astronauts as stationary as possible. The toilet itself looks kind of like an oversized food-processing machine.
It’s not a wholly original system. It’s been adapted from the International Space Station’s Universal Waste Management system. As you can probably imagine, in microgravity, urine can be unwieldy to contain, so they’ve devised a system that uses air instead of gravity to direct waste, with individual urine funnels for each astronaut
A few times a day, astronauts will have to vent urine out into space. Solid poop waste is another matter. That gets deposited into bags, which are then filed away in a poop filing cabinet for storage until the astronauts return to Earth, where it will all be properly disposed of. The ISS has a much more complex recycling system for its waste, which the Artemis 2 mission doesn’t need since it’s so short.
If the system fails, astronauts will fall back on contingency gear that will essentially rocket them backward about 50 years to the toilet facilities used by the Apollo astronauts back in the 1970s. The Artemis two missions aren’t just about heading back to the moon to maybe, possibly one day think about putting a colony up there to extend America’s footprint to beyond our atmosphere. They’re also about discovering new ways to make space travel and potential space colonization more viable and comfortable.
Nobody’s going to want to live in a world where they have to neatly vacuum-seal all of their poops.
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