The importance of space toilets, explained

The Artemis II space mission is making history.

Farthest humans have ever traveled in space? Check. 

First Black, woman, and Canadian astronauts to make it around the moon? Also check. 

First time a toilet has made this journey? Big, important check.

Because while there are many significant questions about space — Is life out there? Could we settle Mars? How far does the universe stretch, really? — one question holds plenty of gravity: What happens when nature calls in space?

This mission hopes to return with answers.

After years of research, the Orion spacecraft used in the Artemis II mission has departed Earth with an actual toilet, door and all. 

In the initial hours after the Orion capsule launched, some of the first reports from the astronauts were about their toilet malfunctioning. They quickly fixed it. But, as they approached the moon, potty problems reigned again.

“If you’re going to do longer missions and eventually potentially even have a base on the moon or go even further onto Mars, you first need to figure out: what are you going to be doing for food, for water, and also for peeing and pooping on the spacecraft and on the surface?” K.R. Callaway, a writer with Scientific American, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram.

So the simple presence of a toilet on this mission?

“Definitely history-making,” she said.

To understand the significance, Sean sat down with Callaway to discuss the history and future of space toiletry. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell us about the history of using the facilities in space.

So back in the ’60s and ’70s, [the] Apollo [program] used these bags. They had different ones for peeing, different ones for pooping, but it was still essentially a bag that you would tape onto your body and just go. It obviously didn’t provide a lot of privacy. We aren’t talking like going into a room with a door and doing this; this was just done in the cabin, and it was not super user-friendly either.

They had a lot of issues with leaks. You know, it’s just an adhesive. It can become unstuck and in low gravity, that can be a big problem for particles escaping.

I had a lot of fun going through the Apollo mission transcripts and just looking at all of the ways that astronauts were describing this after use. They were pretty upset about it. During the Apollo 10 mission, they said, There’s a turd floating through the air.

Wow.

So they had to wrangle that themselves. And even before that, they were having issues. During Apollo 8, there was another pretty notable mission where a crew member was ill. And so the other crew members were chasing down these blobs of both vomit and feces that were just floating wildly through the cabin.

And one of the astronauts you quote in your piece was Ken Mattingly, whose name people might be familiar with from the Apollo 13 mission and of course the Apollo 13 movie.

This was actually one of my favorite quotes that I came across while I was going through the mission transcripts. This is something that Ken Mattingly said on Apollo 16, which is that, “I used to want to be the first man to Mars. This has convinced me that if we got to go on Apollo, I ain’t interested.”

As in, this whole toilet situation is so insufferable, I maybe don’t really want to spend too much time in space anymore.

Exactly. 

So NASA, I imagine, after all the Apollo missions, realizes it needs to advance this technology. How does it do so?

I spoke to Melissa McKinley over at NASA. She is the head of the Toilet Project — the Universal Waste Management System is their technical name, though I’ve been assured that just “toilet” is okay to say. And she mentioned that everything that’s happened from the ’60s and ’70s to now has really been a feat of engineering and design. 

They’ve been able to implement a vacuum system that uses airflow to pull particles down instead of just having them float through space and relying on you to seal the bag yourself and keep everything in.

Help me picture what it looks like, because I’m guessing it does not look like any toilet in one of our homes.

More like an airplane toilet is how I would describe it.

The toilet has a seat and it has a funnel on the side for collecting urine and everyone gets their own separate piece to attach for the part that actually would touch your skin, luckily.

Oh!

For the toilet itself, it’s pretty loud in there.

Astronauts have to wear hearing protection and they also have handles to hold on to because you’re working in no gravity or low gravity and you need a little bit of help to stay in the right position.

So these aren’t plastic bags anymore. Where’s this stuff going? Are we just shooting it out into space?

We are partially shooting it out into space. For urine, it is collected and then it’s going to be vented a couple of times. It’s going to be a controlled process, so it will be just a lot of liquid at once, but yeah, that is where the urine is going. 

For poop, they are storing that on board and then it will be kept in an area of the spacecraft that will actually burn up upon reentry. It’s not coming back to Earth with them, but it is going to stay with them for a while.

And yet, all this testing, all this hype about this new toilet, and one of the first stories we get once the astronauts are up in Earth’s orbit is that something has gone wrong with the toilet! What happened?

Already the toilet has had a few issues. It’s kind of the equivalent of a plumbing issue, but for space.

When they were trying to use it on one of the early days of the mission, they found that there was an error. The issue ended up being with the fan that helps to get the airflow to help with the urine collection — kind of a big problem. And luckily with ground control support, [astronaut] Christina Koch was actually able to fix this almost immediately after it had happened.

The latest I heard over the weekend is that they had toilet trouble again, so maybe not the best plan to have your astronauts also be your plumbers. What’s the latest on this very expensive, very important toilet?

It did seem to break again over the weekend. From what the NASA people were saying, it seems like it’s the same problem again with the urine collection system. The engineers have looked into it a little bit more deeply and they think that it might be ice blocking the tube that would help fully collect the urine.

Astronauts have reported issues with that system collection and then also a smell coming from the toilet area. Definitely a problem that they say they’re going to just keep working on.

This whole toilet thing can feel inconsequential considering what we’re really doing up there in space: exploration, making history, trying to get to Mars one day, all the rest. Why is the toilet important?

One of NASA’s goals with this particular toilet is that it’s a modular design, which means that they can put it not just in the Artemis II capsule, but they can also put it in a lot of different space vehicles. 

They could potentially even adapt it to be on a Mars mission and longer-term missions. They can adapt it so that they can do what the ISS does in terms of liquid recycling and make longer-term, more sustainable missions possible. 

Even though it seems very mundane to us as something that you use every day, for being in space, it’s actually one of the key things that stands in the way of making space more homelike and more able to be a place where we can do longer-term science.

If you can’t figure out the facilities, you’re never gonna figure out Mars.

Exactly.