Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
"In general, the Apollo waste management system worked satisfactorily from an engineering standpoint. From the point of view of crew acceptance, however, the system must be given poor marks. The principal problem with both the urine and fecal collection systems was the fact that these required more manipulation than crewmen were used to in the Earth environment and were, as a consequence, found to be objectionable. The urine receptacle assembly represented an attempt to preclude crew handling of urine specimens but, because urine spills were frequent, the objective of “sanitizing” the process was thwarted.
The fecal collection system presented an even more distasteful set of problems. The collection process required a great deal of skill to preclude escape of feces from the collection bag and consequent soiling of the crew, their clothing, or cabin surfaces. The fecal collection process was, moreover, extremely time consuming because of the level of difficulty involved with use of the system. An Apollo 7 astronaut estimated the time required to correctly accomplish the process at 45 minutes.* Good placement of fecal bags was difficult to attain; this was further complicated by the fact that the flap at the back of the constant wear garment created an opening that was too small for easy placement of the bags.** As was noted earlier, kneading of the bags was required for dispersal of the germicide.
*Entry in the log of Apollo 7 by Astronaut Walter Cunningham.
**The configuration of the constant wear garments on later Apollo missions were modified to correct this problem."
1: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19760005603/downloads/19...
It sounds like that would have allowed them to fix the suit before they went?
They must have eaten the meals and such to be sure they could function, make sure they didn't have any intolerance, for example?
Of course, but the fundamental problem is that difficulties compound. It starts with: pooping is much harder when gravity isn't there to persistently tug on the turd. Something that is slightly obnoxious on Earth (using a bag, using a suit flap) turns into an absolute trainwreck when you have a bag, a suit flap, and turd separation failure. Now you have to do precise mechanical manipulation of an object you don't want to touch behind your back through a bag and a suit flap, every failure multiplies the work, and now the turds can float away to multiply the work outside your immediate vicinity. Ditto for kneading the antibacterial into the poo: if you fail to do this thoroughly on Earth, bacterial offgassing causes the bag to vent, but in all likelihood that's the end of it because you can arrange for gravity to keep the poo away from the vent. In fact, you would probably do this without even thinking or imagining how it could go wrong. In zero gravity, you can't simply arrange "vent on top, poo on bottom", so the event is likely to launch aerosolized poo into your living environment where you have to put up with it for the next few days.
It's difficult to fully appreciate gravity until it's gone.
Astronauts are heroes for the risks they take, but they are also heroes for dealing with this.
I remember seeing a Russian space toilet when they had it set up in the powerhouse museum in Sydney. It looked like a booth with a vaguely pubic area shaped vacuum attachment designed to be unisex. I stared at it for some time trying to work out how it worked. The Apollo system seems horrendous!
Women also started with a feminized version of the uncomfortable device and then switched to diapers, and then men followed.
It's possible there were no women on the design team but I don't think it's a case of bad masculinity.
But I know that air is also a limited resource on space so it can't be solely an "airline-like system"
(Also discarding it "outdoors" might be the best solution in the end)
Weird a silicon-like pants that strapped up so there was no leaks (like fisherman’s pants), that has a vacuum you attach (almost catheter style) isn’t used. Actually now that I think about it, it’s weird that astronauts aren’t using catheters 24/7!
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-23-me-542-st...
[1] (NSFW lyrics!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd9_RffdmBA
Doing barrel roll, twist and speed up - radio to airliner „see buddy can you do that?”
Airliner „wait a moment” - some time passes nothing happens - airliner „hey buddy you seen that?” - f16 „what? Nothing happened” - airliner „I went to toilet on the back, took dump, made myself a coffee and strolled back to cockpit”.
I suppose in an emergency they just shit their pants, but I wonder what the ground crew says when they touch down.
I'm not talking doing menial work while skipping lunch.
A full belly can causes problem if you get wounded.
Besides, I doubt our ancestors went on the hunt with full bellies. I go jogging, but never after a meal.
If I'm busy, I also do not notice being hungry, even if I haven't eaten in 16+ hours.
One more thing. I hitched a ride with autocross racer. While I was strapped in tight, when he'd make a hard turn my guts would slosh over to the side, which was rather painful. The fix was to bear down hard on my abdominal muscles. I expect it would be much worse with a full belly, and a fighter pilot is going to be pulling lots of g's.
But surely there's a middle ground between "heavy lunch" and "skipping lunch entirely" for a multi hour combat sortie?
Many people cannot focus (especially over long periods of time) on an empty stomach.
> If I'm busy, I also do not notice being hungry, even if I haven't eaten in 16+ hours.
Combat sorties are hours of boredom where you have to keep attention just in case, followed by an explosion of frantic action. Unless you're a combat pilot I'd say your experience doesn't apply here?
A favorite Luftwaffe tactic was to come up from behind, catch the tailgunner unawares, and rake it with cannon fire and get an easy kill. If the tailgunner was awake, he'd fire a few rounds of tracers (while out of range) to let the 109 know he was on the bounce, and the 109 would usually back off.
His cohort suffered 80% casualties.
> Many people
are not fit to be combat pilots. The AF is very selective. (I didn't qualify, as I wear glasses.) They work hard to weed out slackers, people of low intelligence, sloppy people, unhealthy people, dishonest people, etc. They'll even reject you for a speeding ticket.
I did say I thought it required constant alertness... over long periods of boredom, a bad combination. It's hours of nothing punctuated by frantic action. Worse to be keeping a watchful eye on a completely empty stomach, I'd say. Happy to be contradicted if your dad told you he flew long combat missions on an empty stomach...
I also think long combat flights with aerial refueling are longer now than in the WW2 era, right? Excluding maybe bombers, but surely bombers did have toilets, even if minimalistic?
> [many people] are not fit to be combat pilots. The AF is very selective.
I'm sure of this, but we're discussing a very specific thing. The other person who replied to my topmost comment, who also seems to be speaking from experience, assured me pilots don't select on this particular basis. In fact, this person said fighter pilots do shit themselves and earn nicknames because of it.
I once went parachute jumping. I did not eat beforehand (and we were advised not to!).
Good news for gassy food lovers is the cabin pressure changes make everyone fart, there's no one else in the cockpit to hear or smell you, and even if there was it'd be loud and they'd be wearing an oxygen mask. Little victories.
When RAF pilots went to the Soviet Union to help the Soviets, when the first frost came the pilots were horrified when the women brought out big vats of fat and ladled it out. But after flying in those cold temperatures, they realized the fat was just the thing to keep them warm!
also apparently an infection risk
I had to do some stool collection and it took every ounce of willpower and a N95 mask to prevent me from vomiting everywhere. And that was my poop. I think it's more than cultural, there's a strong visceral reaction.
On the other hand, I can pickup my dog's poop no problem.
Nurses are heroes.
It is disgusting (I hated doing it) but you get somewhat used to it relatively quickly.
I think it's a question of exposure and tolerance, otherwise it'd be much harder for daycare workers, for instance.
Similarly, it's probably useful for a primitive person to vomit on sight of a familiar person vomiting, collective protection. Definitely a trait to find out before going to space!
And yes, I do have a very vivid imagination.
Alternatively it could just be an overshoot of the behavior to recognize that you bleeding is a dangerous situation. These behaviors probably follow some gaussian distribution in their potential "effect" among the population and fainters are on a long tail of that distribution.
Hmm... perhaps train a robot arm to do it?
Though I guess if that would work, they'd just use those loud suction toilets they use on airplanes.
What cultures are you aware of that do pair programming for poopies?
So for instance a relevant and famous anecdote is that the original tests for Apollo launches didn't have any sort of urine/fecal disposal systems at all. In one delayed launch during testing Alan Shepard was in the capsule for hours and ended up needing to go pee. He asked for permission to depart the capsule, but that was declined to keep it all on track. So he ended up having to just pee all over himself in the suit.
Another piss poor anecdote is Buzz Aldrin on the Moon! When he departed the lunar lander capsule, the impact ended up breaking the urine collection device inside his suit. So his journey on the Moon involved having a healthy dose of urine sloshing around in his boot where it settled.
Of course there's a balance in all things. It's not like they just YOLO'd their way to the Moon. But things where the worst case outcome would be astronaut discomfort were seen as extremely low priority. In the original design, the capsule didn't even have a window or manual controls. So the astronauts were basically just being treated like human Laikas. They had to fight just to get those 'features.'
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I think a big part of the reason for this is because there are basically infinite things that can go wrong. And so if you obsess on getting every single thing right, you'll end up never doing anything at all. In 1962 Kennedy gave his famous 'to the Moon' speech. At that time, we'd only just barely put the first man in orbit but had never done anything beyond that, at all. Just 7 years later a man would walk on the Moon. In modern times we've been basically trying to recreate what we did in the 60s, and spent decades doing so. And this obsession on the details is certainly a big part of the reason why.
I've had a similar conversation with the "but if we really went to the Moon in 1969 why has it taken so long to be able to do it again" folk a few times.
The real answer is of course that we did it once, and realised that a project where about 99% of the failure modes are "astronauts turn into a rapidly expanding cloud of fried mince" and all of these failure modes are incredibly likely was not something we really wanted to do again.
In hindsight we know, that these models were wrong. people were better at predicting risks without relying on formal models. I mean, people were not perfect too, but still they were better. I wonder, if modern engineering has better tools for risk modeling and how good they worked if they were used for Apollo. I mean, if we remove the knowledge specific for space flight, leave only the abstract theory of risk modelling, and then use a time-travel machine to send it to NASA at 1960 or so, could NASA employ modern risk modeling tools to get results on par (or better) to human intuition?
The number of near misses and actual deaths in the Apollo programme loosely indicate the models were right. We just had to up our risk threshold to make the Moon with the era’s technology.
I found the language NASA and the astronauts used to communicate absolutely hilarious - "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!"
Glad they got it working - best of luck to Atemis II mission!
Anything alive that is using energy and doing work and transforming matter must poop in some form or another.
We don’t know what form life out there might take, but we know it poops.
Even post biological machine life would poop in the form of industrial waste, waste heat, etc.
Even near perfect recycling can only be near perfect, not perfect, due to the second law, which means a super efficient organism or closed cycle ecosystem or industry will still poop. Just not much. It will also emit a ton of waste heat, which I guess is kind of poop since mass and energy are ultimately equivalent.
If there’s weird life out there made of plasma or something, it poops. Probably charged particles or something.
The monolith in 2001? It poops. Somehow.
"death before dishonor" xD
Wonderful defense mechanism.
It might not be traditional poop as we know it, but the point is, no matter how far we go one day, no matter what/who we meet out there, no matter how much we advance, there will always be waste to manage.
Waste might be literal poop, waste heat, spent uranium, used oil, slag from a smelter or whatever. We might be perfect recyclers one day, and we might repurpose almost everything, but there will always be a little bit of "poop" left over to manage.
The idea was to place very sensitive wide angle infrared telescopes at remote locations that are UFO sighting hot spots. Because as long as physics is universal anything flying around, especially like supposed alien craft, must be using a lot of power and rejecting tons of waste heat. They’d have to light up very bright in IR and physics says there’s nothing you can do about it (unless you imagine wild ideas like dumping it into another multiverse slice).
You’d get lots of planes but you could cross reference against public data to remove most of those. And obviously something doing maneuvers that are aerodynamically impossible or would turn a human into strawberry jam is not a plane.
I thought it was a good idea but I don’t think it got funded. It was years ago so the tech might have been very expensive. I bet it would be cheaper now. IMO it would be a good low cost but high payoff experiment.
/ducks
corporate talk on a public science mission :/
Apparently one of the down sides about the previous system was that the separation of solid and liquid excreta ideally required someone to separate their excretion of both kinds. Apparently this is something that male astronauts found much much easier than female ones. Artemis's toilet can handle both at the same time.
I still think they have the good old fashioned Maximum Absorbency Garment for space walks though. (CF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Absorbency_Garment)
this invention might be of use in livestock farming.
For liquid waste. This was not exactly the case for solid waste. Effectively it was just a tank. It had something like a "net" in it, this was connected to a shaft, through a gear, to another shaft at the front of the seat. The commander would, every 7 days or so, "actuate the mechanism" to rotate the net and to gather all the waste and compact it into one side of the toilet.
Many commanders said this was the most stressful part of the mission as the mechanism was somewhat delicate and could easily break. In that case you had to don a glove and manually do the work the net was otherwise doing.
If that completely failed, yes, the shuttle had backup "Apollo bags" stored in the middeck lockers.
Toilets are unglamorous in the extreme but absolutely vital. Humans make hazardous and potentially deadly waste. Every day. It needs to be safely discarded/contained. In a sealed environment in microgravity it's even more dangerous than it is on Earth.
Aerosolized fecal matter can enter the lungs and cause deadly infections. Entering the digestive system can cause debilitating (possibly deadly) illness. Temporary blindness if it gets in the eyes. It can also cause mechanical or electrical problems if it gets in equipment. All of these can lead to a mission failure and in extreme instances a total loss of the crew. Apollo 8 was extremely lucky that Frank Borman's illness didn't cause more problems.
If you're not thinking logistics and infrastructure you're not really serious about an endeavor.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-did-van-hale...
> In a sealed environment in microgravity it's even more dangerous than it is on Earth. / Aerosolized fecal matter can enter the lungs and cause deadly infections.
Would the air filtration / recycling system minimize this risk?
A high power "eliminate aerosols" mode would be one of those infrastructure things that need to be designed (and tested). Even then a single compartment spacecraft like the Orion or Dragon wouldn't have anywhere for the crew to bivouac while some aerosol evacuation mode was active. So you'd want a whole procedure designed around it.
Part of the need for the Apollo Constant Wear Garments was to make up for the lack of faculties in the command module and LEM. Such a thing would be impractical for a long duration mission so toilets (and waste disposal in general) need to be a reliably solved problem.
> The air filtration will actually help spread aerosols because air currents will carry them through the cabin before they're captured by a filter.
The toilet facilities could have input / suction into the air filtration system. Maybe wise anyway.
> A high power "eliminate aerosols" mode would be one of those infrastructure things that need to be designed (and tested).
I expect the technology is mature in industrial settings, though of course that is much different than microgravity and the constrained resources of the spacecraft. Maybe it exists on the space station? That context still seems significantly different.
> a single compartment spacecraft like the Orion or Dragon wouldn't have anywhere for the crew to bivouac
In their spacesuits, though their exteriors may need decontamination. Maybe they just go outside, though probably not a great idea to have the entire crew outside the spacecraft simultaneously! Maybe in an emergency.
The Space Shuttle's toilet was just cleaned during servicing after a mission. The Shuttle had a max flight duration of about two weeks so there wasn't a need to have changeable waste containers.
In the case a toilet catastrophically malfunctions in microgravity imagine a snow globe. Whatever way you want to filter out the "snow"...it's going to land on everything inside.
In the most literal sense shit is serious in space.
If you’re going to stay, you are going to be having babies.
Any tech tree proposal for a space settlement (planet, moon, spin stations, whatever) that does not address how to make and reuse or recycle diapers is not serious.
I never see this mentioned in sci-fi or in space nerd discourse around stuff like what you need to settle Mars. It’s up there with potable water, at least if you want humans to reproduce.
This is a hurdle for settlement. Not exploration. Toilets are a hurdle for exploration, as is trauma medicine.
I’m not dismissing the need to do experiments with pregnant rats on the Moon. But until we’re dealing with multi-year missions on Mars, gestation isn’t on the Gantt chart.
> I never see this mentioned in sci-fi
The Expanse and A City on Mars speak to this precisely and extensively.
I have seen engineering shops where the conversation about fixing some small but simple thing before a deadline gets filed into "better to give the consultants reviewing this some low hanging fruit for the snag list."
(0) Actual backstage contract riders for rock stars : https://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstage
https://sites.google.com/site/theageofplastic3d/2001s-zero-g...
You would enter it, activate it, wait until it accelerated to a certain RPM, do the thing, then deactivate it and it would decelerate until it is stationary relative to the rest of the ship again.
I wonder, how expensive it would be to build this for real.
The rotation mechanism could use a flywheel. Let's say, an electric motor spins the toilet section and the flywheel in opposite directions. So that the rest of the ship is not disturbed.
Size and weight are obviously issues, I just wonder how much would be the overhead. I wonder if the real spaceship designers considered this possibility.
toilets are as important as rockets. and oftentimes because they're unsexy, more difficult to solve for. after all, i remember neil armstrong, but not the person who made this modern amenity in my own household.
what a wild rabbit hole
But seriously, although I guess it’s fair to say that errors will occur, still: they couldn’t get the plumbing right?
Which is good enough. The breakthrough propulsion is happening for Artemis III at the SpaceX and Blue Origin shipyards.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Space_Shuttle_toilet...
I wondered why the Artemis crew module weighs twice as much as the Apollo module after 60 years of scientific progress and developments in materials science and aerospace engineering, now I am starting to understand. Plastic bags "worked", not great but they are super light, essentially you are not going to get much lighter than a plastic bag for containing and disposing of waste. On the other hand, that toilet looks insanely overbuilt, how strong do you need the seat to be??
Maybe they can position the astronauts behind it for use as a last-ditch heat shield.
This story reminds be of the tale where during the space race the Americans created a super space pen that works in zero degrees kelvin and vacuum, and the Russians used a pencil.
One of those was attaching electrical probes to each end of a pencil, and applying an electrical current. Graphite conducts extremely well: the pencil "lead" (actually graphite) heats up, glowing a bright orange colour, whilst setting fire to the wooden pencil surrounds. If you snap the graphite "lead", you can touch the two ends together causing a bright electrical arc.
It's a great physics demonstration, and graphite conductivity is the reason pencils aren't used in zero-gravity environments.
> being able to pee and poop simultaneously
... and I know that I could never have been an astronaut. There are many other reasons, but the ability to hold one while doing the other... yeah, I'm out.