The Artemis II space mission, which is sending an astronaut crew on a tour around the moon, is going so smoothly so far that the only problem of note is a busted toilet.
Just last week, I wrote about the highly advanced toilet the crew aboard the Orion spacecraft would have the pleasure of pooping into. Turns out that fancy space toilet didn’t last more than a few hours after launch, when the toilet stopped working. It turns out, it didn’t have enough water added to prime the pump. Thankfully, it was a quick fix, but that wasn’t the end of the crew’s toilet problems.
By day three, a vent line used to dump pee into space froze shut. This was Mission Control’s Apollo 13 moment. This was when the brilliant space engineers got the chance to show off their creativity. Yeah, the stakes were very low, but it was still a fun critical-thinking challenge. Their solution was to rotate the entire spacecraft so the vent line faced the sun, allowing sunlight to melt the blockage. Genius.
Artemis II’s One Major Issue So Far Is a Mess
It was a clever solution that mostly worked. For a while there, the system was cleared only for “fecal use.” To make matters even more obnoxious and mysterious, astronauts also reported a faint burning smell coming from the hygiene bay, a.k.a. bathroom. It was traced to heating insulation. Thankfully, it wasn’t dangerous, but it was not the kind of thing you want to smell when you’re in a relatively small spacecraft looping around the moon.
The crew had a contingency pee receptacle, called the Collapsible Contingency Urinal. It’s a device that looks like a cartoonishly oversized tube of travel-sized toothpaste, roughly the size of a baseball bat that astronauts pee into. Luckily, they didn’t have to use it for long, as the crew restored full function to the bathroom after hours of troubleshooting.
Space travel requires some of the brightest minds in their fields to come together to create a craft that can escape the Earth’s grasp, explore the cosmos, and then bring its inhabitants back home safely. Yet for some reason, the toilet is always broken. Apollo 10 famously had poop floating around in the craft, and the toilets on modern commercial spacecraft are notoriously fickle. Even Orion’s toilet system, supposedly the latest and greatest in space toilet technology, is still breaking down.
No matter how advanced your spacecraft is, you’ll always need a plumber.
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