Let's talk about peeing in space | Hacker News Reader

Let's talk about peeing in space

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294 pointsetxm56 comments

The author (Mary Robinette Kowal) has a Nebula-winning twin-book series which cover an alternate timeline where humanity went to Mars instead of the Moon. The books[1] are a really great read (have a Hidden Figures meets Macgyver/Martian vibe and I loved them).

If you'd like a sample, her Hugo winning novella, "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" (which was expanded into the above 2 books) is available as a free read on Tor.com: https://www.tor.com/2013/09/11/the-lady-astronaut-of-mars/

It was one of my favorite reads of 2013, and you'll greatly enjoy it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calculating_Stars

> The sheaths came in small, medium, and large. It turns out, the men were all saying that they needed a Large sheath. They did not. Subsequently, the astronauts called the sheaths were called "Extra-large," "Immense," and "Unbelievable."

This is a really similar story to one from Trojan condoms, IIRC, whereby everyone was buying the Large size, so the Magnum was born.

I'd believe it in a heartbeat for Trojan, but I have a hard time believing it in the context of a NASA aerospace program. Maybe they joked about it, and the larger size names were born out of that joke, but I can't believe that NASA didn't have doctors and engineers sizing the sheaths for each astronaut, or at least making the decision for the astronauts from the sizes they had. This isn't like they were walking into a walmart and had to decide on their own; this was a multi-million dollar first-of-its-kind space program.

>but I can't believe that NASA didn't have doctors and engineers sizing the sheaths for each astronaut

I understand there's science and professionalism and all but....could you justify measuring dick length to a bunch of astronauts? Not to mention the length changes over time and also nobody wants to be the small sheath surrounded by extra large...

These astronauts undergo rigorous medical checks where every inch of their body is checked and double-checked. And they already come from an armed forces background where detailed medical checks are very common and there is zero shame about nudity. I am pretty sure they would not have had qualms about it if it was indeed necessary. Their space suits are already sized to their specific dimensions.

Also, why does the sheath size have to be such a public thing?

I'd imagine width/circumference is the more important measurement, if it's too long you just have more volume to fill.

This is a really similar story to one from Trojan condoms, IIRC, whereby everyone was buying the Large size, so the Magnum was born.

The radio station WDHA/Dover, New Jersey used to distribute condoms at rock concerts with their logo on the package. When properly applied, they branded the wearer with the radio station's slogan "The Jersey Giant."

The 80's were like that.

The technology is also useful down here on Earth when one astronaut wants to drive 950 miles without stopping to confront the lover of another.

https://www.denverpost.com/2007/02/05/diaper-wearing-astrona...

To be fair, some people just like diapers... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaper_fetishism)

The story is also in song form by Molly Lewis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39st68H1reA

People are complaining that this is painful to read on Twitter, so I expected it would be painful.

Then I actually followed the link and it was delightful! I'm not really a fan or a detractor from the medium, but I don't understand the hate in this particular context.

PS: What a lovely thread about the reality of peeing in space!

Also, the author is the president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a Hugo and Nebula award winner, an audiobook narrator, a podcaster, and a puppeteer, and a blogger. I'm pretty sure she has a good grasp of what medium is suitable for what content.

(I, too, thought it was fine and quite reasonable.)

A Pierson's Puppeteer? With two heads??!

As a scuba diver, we often spend 6+ hours away from toilet facilities, and good hydration is important. With a wet suit, you can just pee and it will wash out.

However, with a dry suit it is similar to a spacesuit. It is a pain to de-suit just to go for a pee (some of the old-timers have zips that allow them to pee above water, but it isn't very common.. and I prefer to pee underwater).

Many people use pee-valves which work in a similar way to the twitter thread. External catheters which are like condoms with glue inside, and a tube which allows the liquid to escape outside the suit.

Trouble is, I didn't know my "size". The medical company that makes them will post a selection of each type and a "sizing chart". The chart is a cardboard disc with cutouts that you can use to measure up against your body. For the same reasons as the thread, they use measuring in millimeters rather than t-shirt sizes.

A few days later, I was on a road trip with my daughter and the company called to see if I received the pack and was able to place a real order. I answered on hands-free and I was asked, "What size will you need sir?". How could I possibly answer that sat next to my daughter? :o

For female divers, the main option is a pad and glue. Sounds awful.

>How could I possibly answer that sat next to my daughter? :o

i'm not trying to start a fight but i will never understand this. you're embarrassed to talk about your body in front of your daughter. what's the point? i remember my mom had a UTI and was embarrassed to discuss it with me when we were on a trip (so she suffered in kisilence). this woman whose body i literally was created in couldn't bring herself to tell me about something normal/typical about her body because of what? puritan culture? i will never get it.

Edit: why am I getting downvoted? What have I said that's so offensive?

The reminder that we have genitals is more unbearable than enduring excruciating pain in those genitals.

Genitals, the stuff genital-adjacent like sex or waste-release -- it's all viscerally disgusting, particularly in the context of family members, and unmoors us from the sanitized, half-reality we have to live in so that we can tolerate each other comfortably.

With strangers, though, it's mostly fine. It makes ironclad sense, just like everything else.

This isn't related to a medical issue. This is reluctance to share with my child the specific size of my genitalia. You think that is peculiar?

I guess I feel like I'd be amazed if she hadn't seen you naked a bunch of times growing up anyway? Maybe my family was odd!

I'd still probably not have the conversation for fear of embarrassing her and that seems fine?

you are normal but normal is strange :)

Don’t feed the trolls.

You had a phone call that completely perfunctorily implicated the size of your penis. As far I'm concerned that's about as uncomplicated as a medical issue - there's no allusion to anything sexual. To wit: do you use your mouth during sex? Would you shy away from answering how large a mouth guard you needed over the phone in front of your daughter?

You must do you, and may the repercussions for that be no more serious than a few downvotes. But as far as everybody else is concerned, this matter is, if not actually outright sexual, at least sex-adjacent, and therefore not an appropriate topic for discussion when one's children are around.

(Your children will probably be grateful for this.)

This might not be logical, but there you go. Something these things aren't. If you feel strongly that this is so ridiculous that things should change, then let nobody tell you that you are wrong, but I think you'll find that this is a minority viewpoint, and you'll attract few fellow travelers for your quixotic quest.

Maybe it's because we're from different cultures (I'm french) but that situation sounds also ridiculous to me.

I've seen both my parents naked and sex was taboo, sure, but genitals in itself (like talking about the size of ones penis for an health issue) were not that much. That situation was not sexual at all and I'm sure your children wouldn't really care (or maybe it's the fact that it was less sacralized in my family). I do not feel traumatized by that and even feel a little insulted by the: > (Your children will probably be grateful for this.)

I'm not saying that one situation is superior to the other one, but I perfectly understand the point of the person you're answering to and feel all those downvotes are a little unfair for a real (and in my pov, valid) opinion.

This is a must read thread, full of so many fun facts: e.g.

> Fun fact: Gravity creates most of the sense of urgency for peeing, so in microgravity, astronauts can't always tell when they need to go.

> It's such a complicated process that they pee on a schedule.

I currently have the inverse problem and solve it in exactly the same way: I'm pregnant and I always feel like I have to pee, even if I just went five seconds ago. I can't tell the difference between the feeling of a full bladder and the feeling of the baby pushing on my bladder.

I deal with it by peeing every hour, so that if it's only been 20 minutes, I can feel pretty confident that the feeling isn't real and I should try to ignore it. I have a lot of sympathy for the astronauts' pee problems these days.

One of the best reads in a long time.

I love reading long stories in a twitter format /s

that's why twitter came to be. 160 characters in 30 blocks

For these types of stories, I find it much more readable than a giant wall of text - the structure of the medium forces you into better storytelling. (Not everything is this type of story, though! I would hate reading a research paper in this format, where each two-sentence block was intended to be interesting enough to be retweeted on its own.)

This isn't unusual in human storytelling. Other forms with a history of constraint causing a better result than an unconstrained pile of text include poetry, songs, and presentation slides.

Twitter threads feel more focussed (than long form content) to me. People skip fluff and focus on the important parts.

@threadreaderapp is your friend:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1152277166996017152.html

My favorite part -- "Peeing or pooping in space is now a lengthy process, involving a fan, a targeting system, and a fair amount of prayer."

More fun facts: www.popsci.com/brief-history-pooping-in-space/

    Let's talk about peeing in space.
    
    Several people, in response to my NY Times essay, have said that women
    couldn't go into space because we lacked the technology for them to
    pee in space.
    
    When the Mercury program was proposed, doctors were worried that
    people would not be able to urinate or even swallow without the aid of
    gravity.
    
    And yet, they still made plans to send a man into space.
    
    Up.
    
    Hello space!
    
    Back down.
    
    They made no plans for peeing.
    
    He asked Mission Control for permission to go in his suit. After
    consultation with flight surgeons & suit technicians, they gave him
    permission to do so.
    
    So he wet himself & still went into space.
    
    It worked great in testing, but when the actual astronauts used it,
    the sheath kept blowing off and leaving them with pee in their suits.
    
    Was this about extended time in the spacesuit?
    
    They did not.
    
    Subsequently, the astronauts called the sheaths were called
    "Extra-large," "Immense," and "Unbelievable."
    
    That worked well for Gemini and Mercury. And by well, I mean there was
    still urine in the capsule and it stank of feces.
    
    Apollo needed a different solution.
    
    If you timed it right.
    
    Open it too early and the vacuum of space reached through the valve to
    grab your manhood.
    
    Apparently, the venting of pee into space is very pretty. It catches
    the sunlight and sparkles.
    
    Buzz Aldrin was the second man on the moon, but the first to pee
    there.
    
    After the accident, they couldn't use the regular vent, because it
    needed to be heated to keep the pee from freezing.
    
    It wasn't meant to be a permanent ban, but the crew didn't understand
    that. So they were stashing pee in every bag or container possible.
    
    He got a UTI and then a kidney infection.
    
    To launch and for a spacewalk, they developed the MAG
    
    Maximum Absorbency Garment.
    
    It's a diaper.
    
    They also developed a zero-G toilet so that astronauts no longer had
    to tape a bag to their ass.
    
    Fun pooping in space fact: Without gravity, the poop doesn't break off
    as it exits your body. You have to reach back and help with special
    gloves.
    
    Sometimes though, the toilet breaks down. At that point, they return
    to using "relief bags" taped to their ass and "manual urine
    containment."
    
    Fun fact: Due to chemicals, it is bright purple and acidic.
    
    Fun fact: Poop regularly escapes, which is why you never eat a milk
    dud found floating in the ISS.
    
    We didn't have the technology for men to pee in space when they
    started either.
    
    And some days, the best solution is still a diaper or a bag taped to
    the ass

Not only is this harder to read, and not only are you losing semantic information (line breaks within a tweet are different from tweet breaks), you're literally missing content, e.g., after "They did not."

It does, however, say something other than "Something went wrong."

FYI, this is hard to read on mobile due to fixed line width. Better to just use italics.

Reading that "article" on twitter was amazingly not miserable but seriously...is it a thing to write articles in twitter feeds

I don’t understand. This is good information, but why do I have to read this on a Twitter feed? Why not an article or proper blog?

Aren't you the one who's being pretentious by complaining about how you have to read it on a microblogging site?

Reading an article in the form of a twitter storm is not something I'd blame someone complaining about.

She paced it well and really made it work and who knows, that may have been the perfect place.

I have to believe there is some consensus on a twitter stream exceeding a certain length being better off as a blog and this would qualify in those numbers

Trading your audience for a better medium is a hard bargain to accept.

That's the conversation right? Is this a better medium, are blogs just not as effective.

To advocate for this medium, I definitely care little for the amount of advertising done in blogs. Everything looks like a 1990s Warez site

Pretentious doesn't seem to fit.

Great read, but I couldn't help but think about how Twitter is the worst possible format for this, compared to literally anything else.

A blog post. A news article. Even a video.

I was confused as to why this was a link to Twitter as opposed to a direct link. The over-dependence on platforms like Twitter has reached the point of parody.

"special gloves"

Is this one of those examples where Nasa spends $50m developing special acronymed gloves, and the Russians went to the chemist and bought some bog standard rubber gloves?

You're referencing that one chain mail from the late 90s right? That said that Americans spent millions developing zero-g pens but the Russians used a pencil?

Yeah, it's fake and stupid. Pencil shavings chip off and don't fall to the floor in space. The graphite parts float around and clog up critical equipment. Pencils themselves are flammable and after the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts, NASA was a little gun-shy about sending flammable material into space. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-write-stuff/

It's super fun to talk about simple solutions and how NASA loves to overengineer things, but there are actual constraints to consider in micro gravity.

If you'd like a more believable "just so" legend, try the toothpaste box story.

https://cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEngineers.h...

What’s interesting about this is how poor the fan would have been on it’s own. Let’s say you set it up on day 1, now on day 200 you notice it’s off, and suddenly you have no idea how many empty boxes you just shipped.

However, as part of a redundant system it seems like a great idea.

Or, you know, put 2 fans on the line rather than 1.

You could pay someone for years and year just to watch and make sure the fan stays on... for less than the price of the consultant they paid. If that person can also do other things, even better.

"You don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate this story.". Actually It's a lot easier to enjoy the story if you aren't an engineer. The use of compressed air is so bog standard on production lines it would be the first solution proposed before a meeting was even scheduled.

That's why it's a great "just so" along the lines of how the leopard got his spots.

"And that, oh best-beloved, is how we came to use compressed air to sort by density on production lines..."

You mean like the space pen vs pencil thing, where Fisher spent his own money to design and make it and sold it to both the Americans and Russians because pencils are a huge fire hazard in zero G?

My grandmother's email had better poise.

It was more of a what does special mean in this context, I was attempting to be light hearted about it.

Special probably just means nitrile.

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