Artemis II only has one problem so far, and it’s an ugly one
The Artemis II space mission, which sends an astronaut crew on a trip around the moon, is going so smoothly so far that the only problem of note is a burst toilet.
Last week I wrote about the very advanced toilet that the crew aboard the Orion spacecraft would have the pleasure of pooping into. Turns out the fancy space toilet didn’t last more than a few hours after launch when the toilet stopped working. It turns out that not enough water was added to prime the pump. Fortunately, it was a quick fix, but it wasn’t the end of the crew’s toilet problems.
On day three, a vent line used to dump pee into the room froze. This was Mission Control’s Apollo 13 moment. That’s when the genius space engineers got the chance to show off their creativity. Yes, the stakes were very low, but it was still fun critical thinking. Their solution was to rotate the entire spacecraft so that the vent line faced the sun, allowing sunlight to melt the blockage. Brilliant.
Artemis II’s One Major Issue So Far Is a Mess
It was a clever solution that mostly worked. For a while there, the system was only cleared for “faecal use”. To make matters even more unpleasant and mysterious, astronauts also reported a faint burning smell from the hygiene bay, also known as the bathroom. It was traced to thermal insulation. Fortunately, it wasn’t dangerous, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you want to smell when you’re in a relatively small spacecraft orbiting the moon.
The crew had a pee container, called a Collapsible Urinal. It’s a device that looks like a cartoonishly oversized tube of travel-sized toothpaste, about the size of a baseball bat, that astronauts pee in. Fortunately, they didn’t have to use it for long as the crew restored full functionality to the bathroom after hours of troubleshooting.
Space travel requires some of the brightest minds in their field to join forces to create a craft that can escape Earth’s grasp, explore the cosmos, and then bring its inhabitants back home safely. But for some reason the toilet is always broken. Apollo 10 famously had feces floating around the craft, and the toilets on modern commercial spacecraft are notoriously changeable. Even Orion’s toilet system, supposedly the latest and greatest in space toilet technology, is still broken.
No matter how advanced your spacecraft is, you always need a plumber.
