Astronauts Got No Place to Pee

I refuse to drop the familiar phrase when NASA runs into an orbital snafu, but there is a problem on board the International Space Station ("ISS").

A plugged toilet is the current issue plaguing the ISS inhabitants. Yes, the only toilet on board the ISS, aside from the one inside the Soyuz escape module (which only has 3 days of waste capacity with a full three-person ISS crew). The ISS needs spare parts pronto, luckily, if they can determine the root of the stoppage, NASA could get parts loaded onto Discovery which is currently sitting at the launch pad.

As you may have guessed, these toilets aren't found at Home Depot, they are high-tech toilets of the space world with zero grav. The toilets are driven by air flow (vacuum) to transport the poo away from a crew member's body into a sanitary storage receptacle. Back in the Apollo days, there wasn't even the vacuum driven toilets, rather they used bags with sticky openings to seal the poo inside. Believe it or not, history has been saving the current ISS crew as they have dipped into their emergency supply of Apollo era ziplock bags.

There seems to be an intermittent problem with air/water separator...a fabrication flaw of the toilet's original compressor unit (and a backup unit!). The toilet has been returned to service several times over the past several days only to be then taken back out of service shortly after NASA or the Russians thought they had 'er working. One (yes, anonymous) source in Houston said that the hardware used there for crew training may be flown to Florida for launch aboard Discovery, even though it too is expected to fail quickly after installation. A new toilet device, developed to accommodate a six person crew as opposed to the current three, was already planned for delivery later in 2008. It apparently can't come soon enough as NASA is expecting to rely on the ever-faulting current toilet compressor and the Apollo poo bags until that time.

This may not seem to be an Apollo 13-esque emergency, however, no doubt NASA and the Russians will contrive some goofy fix all held together with duct tape.

Home to PointNiner