How Do Astronauts Poop In Space?

Recently, the Artemis II crew took a trip to the moon and back. The astronauts involved – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen, and Christina Koch – were the first to reach the satellite in over 50 years, and spent 10 whole days in space.

A visit to the moon in the age of social media was a beautiful thing. Some people filmed the rocket’s launch from the window of their commercial flight. We got new, beautiful images of the Earth from space.

But while some were touched by the drive, ingenuity, and ambition of the mission, I was left with a more prosaic question: what happens when astronauts need the loo?

Taking a trip to the toilet in a low-gravity environment is no easy feat.

Previous missions, like Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, had no toilets. Astronauts used to tape plastic bags to their buttocks to capture the waste. Then, after a bowel movement, astronauts would seal the bag and knead in a chemical designed to kill bacteria.

This was, it’s safe to say, less than optimal. In the Apollo 10 mission, for instance, one astronaut is recorded as saying, “Give me a napkin quick, there’s a turd floating through the air”.

But the Artemis II rocket, Artemis Orion, was an exception: it had a specially-designed loo as part of its Universal Waste Management System.

This took the form of a cubicle built under the floor of the capsule, though in a video, astronaut Christina Koch explained: “Once you’re in there… you have no idea whether you’re on the floor or which way your head is facing or anything. You could be floor, ceiling, wall, doesn’t matter.”

For that reason, she explained, you need to use the handholds placed in the walls on the sides of the loo. Sometimes, tethers are used too.

The heavily-insulated walls are designed to muffle the incredibly loud sounds of its plumbing, she continued, which uses air flow to divert urine away via a hose and, the BBC reported, has a “special seat with strong suction which pulls [solid matter] into a container, which is sealed”.

At one point during its flight, NASA said Artemis Orion II’s loo faced issues.

It was no longer able to dump its waste into space, and the astronauts had to rely on a secondary system of plastic containers too.

“I’m proud to call myself the space plumber, I like to say that it is probably the most important piece of equipment on board,” astronaut Christina Koch said at the time.