41–50 of 183 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did they not have the astronauts simulate the mission beforehand, on Earth? Wear the clothing, eat the meals, use the toilet, etc? It sounds like that would have allowed them to fix the suit before they went? They must have eaten the meals and such to be sure they could function, make sure they didn't have any intolerance, for example?
How do you simulate zero gravity on earth?
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…
Did they not have the astronauts simulate the mission beforehand, on Earth? Wear the clothing, eat the meals, use the toilet, etc? It sounds like that would have allowed them to fix the suit before they went? They must have eaten the meals and such to be sure they could function, make sure they didn't have any intolerance, for example?
Of course, but the fundamental problem is that difficulties compound. It starts with: pooping is much harder when gravity isn't there to persistently tug on the turd. Something that is slightly obnoxious on Earth (using a bag, using a suit flap) turns into an absolute trainwreck when you have a bag, a suit flap, and turd separation failure. Now you have to do precise mechanical manipulation of an object you don't want to touch behind your back through a bag and a suit flap, every failure multiplies the work, and now the turds can float away to multiply the work outside your immediate vicinity. Ditto for kneading the antibacterial into the poo: if you fail to do this thoroughly on Earth, bacterial offgassing causes the bag to vent, but in all likelihood that's the end of it because you can arrange for gravity to keep the poo away from the vent. In fact, you would probably do this without even thinking or imagining how it could go wrong. In zero gravity, you can't simply arrange "vent on top, poo on bottom", so the event is likely to launch aerosolized poo into your living environment where you have to put up with it for the next few days.
It's difficult to fully appreciate gravity until it's gone.
Astronauts are heroes for the risks they take, but they are also heroes for dealing with this.
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 toil…
> separation of solid and liquid excreta this invention might be of use in livestock farming.
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.
I gauge the seriousness of all manned space exploration proposals by the attention paid to the toilets. If the toilets are not a solved problem with many nines of reliability, you're just writing science function and are not at all serious about actual manned space exploration. Toilets are the brown M&M clause[0] of manned spaceflight proposals. Toilets are unglamorous in the extreme but absolutely vital. Humans make…