NASA’s historic mission back to the moon has largely gone off without a hitch over the last five days - with one major and potentially smelly exception.
The Orion spacecraft’s $23 million toilet - the euphemistically-titled Universal Waste Management System - was on the fritz on the first day of the 10-day mission, providing a major headache for NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
The first issue, last Thursday, was with the toilet pump, which needed extra water to be ready for use. A second issue occurred Saturday with the wastewater dump, which had ice blocking the liquid from being sent out into space. Fortunately, the problems with the first-ever toilet to travel to deep space have been fixable so far.
The Artemis II flight, which launched from Houston, Texas, last Wednesday is the first time that humans have returned to the moon in 53 years. The long-term goal is establishing a permanent base on the moon that will allow astronauts to travel on to Mars in the future.
On Monday, at 1:56 p.m. (ET), the crew is expected fly around the dark side of the moon, breaking the record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth.
The astronauts will then begin the journey back to Earth, and are expected to make a splash landing off the California coast Friday night at 8:07 p.m ET.
Artemis II’s Universal Waste Management System uses airflow to pull urine and feces away from the body in the zero-gravity space environment. There are foot restraints and handholds for astronauts to keep themselves from floating away.
All toilet paper and solid waste is store in individual water-tight bags, regardless of whether or not the toilet is functioning.
Both times the toilet has had issues, the astronauts were instructed to use it only for bowel movements before mission control in Houston could help them fix it.
They were instructed to urinate in Collapsible Contingency Urinals - long, tube-like plastic containers that replace the need for diapers. Diapers were used in the first days of NASA’s lunar missions, during the Apollo space program between 1969-1972.
During the 1969 Apollo 10 mission, there was even an incident with a floating turd. "Give me a napkin, quick," NASA commander Tom Stafford said, according to NASA transcripts of the mission. "There's a turd floating through the air."
The first apparatus even resembling a toilet wasn’t sent to space until the 1973 Skylab space station launch. Many improvements have been made in the decades since then.
The first iteration of the Universal Waste Management System is on the International Space Station. It launched during a cargo mission in 2020.
But the tech is still fairly experimental and future missions will require some tweaking, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.
Right now, the toilet is “almost a bonus capability,” he said. “We can do a lot of extraordinary things in space right now, but nailing this capability is one that we need to certainly work on.”
Mars is a lot farther away than the moon. It takes about 7-10 months to reach the Red Planet, according to NASA.
That means the astronauts will need a working toilet system that can survive that kind of a trip without too many issues.
"Our future goals are to stabilize and dry the metabolic waste to make it microbially inactive and possibly reuse that water, reduce the amount of consumables for the potty, because it does really accumulate on a long mission,” Jim Broyan, a deputy program manager for Environmental Control and Life Support Technology and Crew Health and Performance at NASA's Johnson Space Center, said in 2020.
“And we're also looking at, ‘Can we reuse some of the waste?’"
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