Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

More on what astronauts found “objectionable” and “distasteful” with Apollo's system, from the PDF linked in the OP (1):

"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...

Listening to the live stream yesterday evening - they performed a significant amount of troubleshooting for the toilet. This required consulting with a full team of experts, including a "Toilet Lead". It seems it wasn't "flushing" waste into the collection bag or something similar - but they were eventually able to get it working.

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!

Toileting is really fecking important. As someone with a spinal injury you really don't realise just how important until it goes wrong.

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)

I worked on the shuttle for a summer a long time ago, and my group's admin was obsessed with the toilet plumbing so she had engineers stopping by with specs and diagrams a few times per week. True story: there was a component in the liquid waste system called the "last drop pinch tube". She laughed about that for weeks.

I remember some old sci-fi book or short story (don't remember which one) that had a spaceship with a separate spinning section specifically for a toilet.

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.

I couldn't stop thinking about the complicated U-boat toilet to allow discharging waste while submerged. One set off a chain of events that lead to its ship's demise. Someone decided to use it without consulting the toilet technician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-1206

This is one of those stupid, unglamorous works that legitimately facilitates long-term space exploration ambitions in a way just focusing on the sexy bits, e.g. propulsion.

Reduced need for waste disposal is one of the mixed blessings of a steady diet of MRE's (sometimes called "Meals Refusing to Exit"). It's sobering to realize that anyone who has ever set foot on the moon was most likely backed up in a bad way when they stepped out of their LEM.

One of the good laughs I had watching 2001 was Haywood reading the instructions for the toilet. The joke being we have evolved to the point that our most basic human functions has become complex.

https://sites.google.com/site/theageofplastic3d/2001s-zero-g...

I just tuned into the NASA live stream after this and the first, and only, thing I've heard is "we've had a successful ejection. toilet is go for use"

i had a realisation reading this story, the NASA report and the apollo transcripts. very often i use the shorthand, "oh but this is not rocket science" & "if we can go to the moon, this is easy stuff." i think this same approach led to us designing thermodynamically & aeronautically elegant machines, but completing screwing up something as basic as a toilet.

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

Relevantly, the Artemis 2 waste management system was non functional for a bit: https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/04/02/artemis-ii-fl...

Finally, some deshitification news on HN!

There is interesting exact timing for (first attempt for sure) the noise of getting humans round trip around the moon, that space toilet discussion and the shitty situation with aircraft carriers in failed war with Iran.

I can't believe no one has brought up the legendary Apollo 10 "turd incident" https://archive.ph/J61jD

(It’s interesting, there’s no mention of AI in this thread anywhere)

It's so ironic reading about all of the Orion heat shield engineering problems but at least they have a groundbreaking new toilet!!

Millions of homeless don't have access to a normal toilet. Well done america

While space has always interested me quite a bit, I've never looked into the toilet situation and I had this scene [0] from an unrealistic kids movie firmly fixed in my brain as "this is how they use the restroom in space, or something better since that movie is old".

[0] https://youtu.be/pJQGJmYKWZ0?t=131

All the advanced engineering in the world and you still need to figure out how a toilet works in zero gravity.

They should have trained plumbers to be astronauts instead of training astronauts to be plumbers. (Armageddon reference)

But seriously, although I guess it’s fair to say that errors will occur, still: they couldn’t get the plumbing right?

> Early toilets on both the space shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS) used this vacuum system

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.

Uh oh, that toilet looks pretty heavy, how much does that thing weigh? Will the extra weight be worth it during reentry? Or will the crew push the whole thing out the airlock on the way home?

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.

I wish there had been some comparison to how the Dragon toilet works.

And people say there's no innovation in the Artemis stack

What a frustrating article. It contains a lot of unimportant chitchat but basically no information on how the toilet actually works.

Thoroughly enjoyed reading this, especially the author’s repeated obsession on the door vs. curtain innovation…

When you gotta boldly go, you gotta boldly go!

A lot of Americans don't have toilets but elite needs toilet for moon.

and here I though they were talking about MS products....my bad...

Great, but robots don't poop.