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Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#71

Post by XorNot »

pyuser583 wrote: post #50
giantrobot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Frankly this is true about Earth too. Not enough effort is spent wisely managing human waste, and many people die as a result.

Municipal plumbing is one of the wonders of the modern world and I appreciate it every time I use it.

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#72

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #66
asdff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a big issue is I'm guessing insistence on having this be a solo operation for cultural reasons. Seems like it would be easy with two astronauts. Have the one bend over and spread the cheeks wide with both hands, the other basically does the hand in the dog poop bag trick right as the poop is coming out and wipes them up after. No worse than what a nurse does every day for work.

I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut, but yeah… pass. Weird a silicon-like pants that strapped up so there was no leaks (like fisherman’s pants), that has a vacuum you attach (almost catheter style) isn’t used. Actually now that I think about it, it’s weird that astronauts aren’t using catheters 24/7!

catheters are very uncomfortable

also apparently an infection risk

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#73

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

Alupis wrote: post #9

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!"

corporate talk on a public science mission :/

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#74

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

api wrote: post #62
whackernews wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this. No matter what we do and how far we push the limits of humanity, we still have to shit.

The second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything poops. Anything alive that is using energy and doing work and transforming matter must poop in some form or another. We don’t know what form life out there might take, but we know it poops. Even post biological machine life would poop in the form of industrial waste, waste heat, etc. Even near perfect recycling can only be near perfect, not perfect, due to the…

can't you have life that dies before it poops?

"death before dishonor" xD

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#75

Post by pulvinar »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #60
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps buoyancy could be a decent substitute, at least for the solid waste part. I imagine being waist deep and flushing the entire bathroom after each training session. Maybe some kind of spatula/squeegee might assist with separation, coupled with a robotic spatula cleaner and sanitizer. There would be a monitor and cameras so you could calibrate your aim. What an odd workday that would be.

buoyancy only applies in gravity. The buoyant force on an object is equal to and opposite of the weight of the displaced fluid. No gravity, no weight.

The goal here is neutral buoyancy when in gravity so that it behaves as though there were no gravity. Put a bag of water in water and it floats like the rest of the water, gravity or no.

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#76

Post by scarier »

XorNot wrote: post #69
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut, but yeah… pass. Weird a silicon-like pants that strapped up so there was no leaks (like fisherman’s pants), that has a vacuum you attach (almost catheter style) isn’t used. Actually now that I think about it, it’s weird that astronauts aren’t using catheters 24/7!

I mean this has also been a problem for fighter pilots as well. The "piddle packs" for F-16 pilots are implicared at least one crash due to the complexity of using them. [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-23-me-542-st...

To be fair they're pretty easy to use as long as you don't have to fly an airplane at the same time...

[1] (NSFW lyrics!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd9_RffdmBA

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#77

Post by userbinator »

asdff wrote: post #55
azalemeth wrote: post #17

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…

Centrifuge would separate that stool and urine

More like turn them both into a liquid.

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#78

Post by giantrobot »

mmooss wrote: post #33
giantrobot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The air filtration will actually help spread aerosols because air currents will carry them through the cabin before they're captured by a filter. A high power "eliminate aerosols" mode would be one of those infrastructure things that need to be designed (and tested). Even then a single compartment spacecraft like the Orion or Dragon wouldn't have anywhere for the crew to bivouac while some aerosol evacuation mode was…

Good points. A few hot takes: > The air filtration will actually help spread aerosols because air currents will carry them through the cabin before they're captured by a filter. The toilet facilities could have input / suction into the air filtration system. Maybe wise anyway. > A high power "eliminate aerosols" mode would be one of those infrastructure things that need to be designed (and tested). I expect the techn…

The Space Shuttle and ISS (and Orion) had/have microgravity toilets. They have some active suction and spinning tines that push the material against the walls of the containment vessel. The ISS toilet has changeable waste containers that are dumped in the unmanned supply capsules.

The Space Shuttle's toilet was just cleaned during servicing after a mission. The Shuttle had a max flight duration of about two weeks so there wasn't a need to have changeable waste containers.

In the case a toilet catastrophically malfunctions in microgravity imagine a snow globe. Whatever way you want to filter out the "snow"...it's going to land on everything inside.

In the most literal sense shit is serious in space.

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#79

Post by kube-system »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #31
Alupis wrote: post #9

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 -…

Apparently the way they got it working was to power cycle the toilet.

[dead]

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#80

Post by dotancohen »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #74
api wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything poops. Anything alive that is using energy and doing work and transforming matter must poop in some form or another. We don’t know what form life out there might take, but we know it poops. Even post biological machine life would poop in the form of industrial waste, waste heat, etc. Even near perfect recycling can only be near perfect, not perfect, due to the…

can't you have life that dies before it poops? "death before dishonor" xD

Whatever eats that thing has to deal with the waste that it stores.

Wonderful defense mechanism.

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