NASA’s return to the moon just hit an awkward problem: the toilet is failing

As American astronauts fly to the moon for the first time in 50 years, the test flight has gone off without a hitch, almost. Happily, this time around, the “Houston, we’ve had a problem” moment came with much lower stakes than Apollo 13’s oxygen leak.

NASA’s Artemis II is the first crewed mission featuring a proper toilet – a major upgrade from the Apollo-era days of astronauts chasing runaway bodily emissions in zero gravity.

Historically, waste capture was handled by a crude system of plastic bags attached to spacesuits, a headache for astronauts already contending with the many life-threatening challenges of space travel. So far, the high tech toilet has come with some problems of its own.

Toilet troubles

Shortly after launching, a blinking fault light signaled that the toilet was acting up. That problem caused the space loo to be closed for repairs during the mission’s first six hours, a short interval of time but long enough to force at least one astronaut to resort to relieving themselves the old-fashioned way, into a bag connected to a funnel. 

In a press conference last week, Artemis flight director Judd Frieling explained that the toilet didn’t have the right amount of water in its dispenser to keep the pump wet enough to work. “Once we figured out that we didn’t put enough water in, we put more in there, [and] made sure… the pump was primed, and then the toilet came right back up.” Self-described “space plumber” Christina Koch, one of the four Artemis II astronauts, implemented the fix.

“The Artemis II crew, working closely with mission control in Houston, were able to restore the Orion spacecraft’s toilet to normal operations following the proximity operations demonstration,” NASA’s Joseph Zakrzewski wrote in a mission update on Thursday.

The waste management system caused problems again by Saturday, when it wasn’t able to successfully vent collected waste into space. Frieling told reporters over the weekend that the issue was likely caused by frozen urine blocking the line. 

To help thaw the line, mission control decided to rotate the Orion so the frozen zone faced the sun, a solution that partially unclogged it. That freed the space toilet up for solid waste, but astronauts were still directed to pee into a backup system known as the Collapsible Contingency Urinal (CCU) until around midnight when the line was fully cleared out. “You are go for all types of use of the toilet,” NASA’s Jacki Mahaffey told the crew around midnight on Saturday night.

Boldly going on the Orion

In 2020, NASA introduced the Universal Waste Management System (UWMS), a space commode that offers astronauts an approximation of a normal terrestrial toilet. The International Space Station got its own high-tech toilet upgrade that year on a resupply mission, but the technology remained untested on spacecraft like the Orion, which just set the record for the greatest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth.

If curiosity is killing you, the crew offered a “live look” outside the Orion as crewmembers executed a wastewater dump around the 9 minute mark of the Artemis II’s day three highlights video on YouTube.

Artemis II Mission Management Team, NASA’s Space Launch System Program Manager John Honeycutt addressed the intense curiosity in the unfolding space toilet drama during a Sunday press event. “I think the fixation on the toilet is kind of human nature,” he said. “Everybody knows how important that is to us here on Earth. And it’s harder to manage in space.”

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