Pooping in space is hard. There’s no gravity to help your colon along, and things stick to moisture, leaving you sporting an umbilical cord that’s almost impossible to sever. The solution to this is a containment device attached to the spacesuit, which uses airflow to suck the waste into a plastic bag.
“It’s actually pretty hard to get things to dislodge from your body and go into the containment devices,” Richard Garriott, game developer, entrepreneur, and astronaut, tells me. “And people work out a variety of things, from bouncing to hand manipulation. Then they try to clean themselves. It’s not fun.”
