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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

#101

Post by etskinner »

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 -…

I especially liked the part where mission control referred to using the toilet as "donation"

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

#103

Post by Feathercrown »

acyou wrote: post #81

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 bag…

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but weren't pencils ruled out by NASA because of the dust they create when they write? The toilet engineering could be a similar situation. These people are professionals, we should not assume they built it like this for no reason.

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

#104

Post by darkwater »

riffraff wrote: post #87
smackeyacky wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps nurses would be a better pool of astronaut candidates than test pilots. I remember seeing a Russian space toilet when they had it set up in the powerhouse museum in Sydney. It looked like a booth with a vaguely pubic area shaped vacuum attachment designed to be unisex. I stared at it for some time trying to work out how it worked. The Apollo system seems horrendous!

IIRC from the book " packing for mars" the American man astronauts begged NASA to provide them with diapers at some point, which is what women astronauts got, because the earlier male-only system was a sort of sucking condom which was incredibly bad.

This really tells you how "bad masculinity" pervaded everything. I'm speaking of the designers here, not the astronauts. Why not a diaper also for male astronauts from the beginning? Isn't manly enough? Does it show weakness, like a toddler or an old dying man?

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

#105

Post by [deleted] »

joecool1029 wrote: post #97

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

[deleted]

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

#106

Post by ricardobeat »

furyofantares wrote: post #14

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"

A thought: is the ejected space poop going to continue to travel in space at 15000km/h and eventually drop into the sun, or will it also be captured by gravity and land on the moon?

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

#107

Post by vova_hn2 »

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.

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

#108

Post by raverbashing »

smackeyacky wrote: post #65
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.

Perhaps nurses would be a better pool of astronaut candidates than test pilots. I remember seeing a Russian space toilet when they had it set up in the powerhouse museum in Sydney. It looked like a booth with a vaguely pubic area shaped vacuum attachment designed to be unisex. I stared at it for some time trying to work out how it worked. The Apollo system seems horrendous!

Honestly replacing gravity with negative air pressure might have been the ideal solution

But I know that air is also a limited resource on space so it can't be solely an "airline-like system"

(Also discarding it "outdoors" might be the best solution in the end)

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

#109

Post by ErroneousBosh »

somenameforme wrote: post #99
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #35

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?

Apollo was largely driven with the purpose of achieving the goal rather than obsessing on the details on the way to that goal. In fact during Apollo they even completely scrapped mathematical risk modeling because the results it always gave were basically 'you die.' So for instance a relevant and famous anecdote is that the original tests for Apollo launches didn't have any sort of urine/fecal disposal systems at all…

> In fact during Apollo they even completely scrapped mathematical risk modeling because the results it always gave were basically 'you die.'

I've had a similar conversation with the "but if we really went to the Moon in 1969 why has it taken so long to be able to do it again" folk a few times.

The real answer is of course that we did it once, and realised that a project where about 99% of the failure modes are "astronauts turn into a rapidly expanding cloud of fried mince" and all of these failure modes are incredibly likely was not something we really wanted to do again.

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

#110

Post by Marha01 »

asdff wrote: post #54
smallmancontrov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warning: gross 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 objec…

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.

> Seems like a big issue is I'm guessing insistence on having this be a solo operation for cultural reasons.

Hmm... perhaps train a robot arm to do it?

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