The Space Toilet Episode

“How do astronauts go to the bathroom in space?” This is a question we hear often at the Museum, asked by people young and old from all around the world. Host Sean Mobley enlisted Museum of Flight expert Brenda Mandt, one of the masterminds behind the Museum’s NASA Space Shuttle Full Fuselage Trainer Tours, to investigate how humans carry out this universal body function in space. In this first of two episodes, Brenda shares about the early tests and solutions developed for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. They were messy and uncomfortable!

Support the podcast and the Museum by giving at this link. Your donation helps keep the podcast going.

Want more space physiology? Check out this episode from the Flight Deck archives with Museum of Flight Docent and Space Expert Tommy Gantz about the effects of space on the human body.

Walk around the NASA Full Fuselage Trainer without leaving your home! Check out our full 3D VR scan of the trainer here. Can you find the toilet?

If you want to read more of the Apollo 10 transcripts, you can find them here. They show a vastly different side of the astronauts than you’ve seen before. The recording played during the episode is transcribed on page 414 of the document.

Credits:

Host/Producer: Sean Mobley 

Producer: Megan Ellingwood

Webmaster: Layne Benofsky 

Social Media Specialist: Tori Hunt 

Transcript

00:00:00

SEAN MOBLEY:       The Flight Deck is made possible by the generous donors supporting the Museum of Flight. You can support this podcast and the Museum of Flight's other initiatives across the United States and the world by visiting museumofflight.org/podcast.

[Music]

SM:     Hello there, and welcome to The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Sean Mobley. Today, we're talking about one of the most commonly-asked about topics in our space exhibits. How do astronauts go to the bathroom? The Museum of Flight has a space toilet on display in our Charles Simonyi Space Gallery, in addition to the very unique tours to the inside of an actual NASA space shuttle trainer that show where the bathroom would have been in the crew compartment. To learn more about this, I sat down with Museum of Flight Staff Member Brenda Mandt, one of our space shuttle experts who organizes and leads visitors on tours through the space shuttle trainer crew compartment. After hundreds of these tours, I'll just say, if you've got a question about space toilets, she's probably heard it before.

00:01:16

SM:     Now, a quick heads up, we are talking about toilets here and what goes in them with candor. So, if you don't want to hear about this natural biological function, then you'll want to skip this episode or maybe just don't listen while you're eating your lunch. This episode is part one of our conversation where Brenda shares about the early trials with human waste in space during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.

[Music]

BRENDA MANDT:   The crew compartment is about 200 square feet, which is the size of a very small apartment.

SM:     Typical Seattle apartment.

BM:     Yes, like a shoebox apartment. And that 200 square feet is split between two floors, so it's a very cramped space. Because of the spacing issue, we allow no more than six guests on a tour at a time with two tour guides since only about four people can fit on the flight deck at a time.

00:02:13

BM:     So, we divide the tour into two sections, the mid-deck and the flight deck, where we go over the essentials of each area. And one of the essentials on the mid-deck is the space toilet.

SM:     That's a pretty common question, isn't it?

BM:     It's actually how we end every single mid-deck tour because the toilet in the space shuttle is right next to the, what they call, the inter-deck access aid, which is just a ladder. So, if we have two guides in a tour, the person on the flight deck can see when the mid-deck tour is done when we close that toilet door.

SM:     The history of space toilets turns out to be pretty interesting. After all, it's something everyone has to do.

BM:     Yes.

SM:     How did this all get started? Did the first people who went to space in the U.S. program even have a toilet?

BM:     No. No, they did not. In fact, the first toilet was not until the first space station on Skylab. Now, they did have accommodations for using the restroom in space, but not actually on the very first mission. Alan Shepard's very first Mercury mission was projected to only last about 15 minutes, and it did. And so, they didn't give him anything that he could do to use the restroom with. They failed to account for the hours and hours that astronauts spend in the pod on the launch pad. And so, after about four hours of sitting in the Mercury capsule on the launch pad, Alan Shepard realized he had to go to the bathroom, and they wouldn't let him out of the Mercury capsule. And so, he just went.

00:04:04

SM:     We think of our astronauts as these heroic figures, and here he is.

BM:     Yeah, probably not the greatest experience there.

SM:     They certainly learned from that though. Were they able to remedy the situation pretty quickly?

BM:     Yeah. So, what they wound up doing was they had what they called a roll-on cuff made out of latex, which flew on the rest of the Mercury missions for urination purposes. And it had the roll‑on cuff part, and then, it also had a bag underneath and a tube to connect and a clamp for the tube. So, once the waste was in the bag, they could clamp it off so it wouldn't come back up. Now, Mercury was a one-person capsule, so they didn't have to worry about privacy or anything. And they kept using these roll-on cuffs pretty much until there were space toilets, so through Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

SM:     The Apollo 11 capsule, when it was here, do you recall seeing any of the toilet stuff there?

00:05:22

BM:     Yes. So, one of the interesting things about liquid waste is it has most of the same physical properties of water, and so, when it is released in zero degrees Kelvin temperature and zero pressure of space, it freezes and then it sublimates. So, it goes from a solid to a gas. They would jettison their liquid waste overboard starting in Gemini. They call it Constellation Urion because it would freeze and get all sparkly and then it would just disappear.

SM:     That's beauty.

BM:     Yes. Yes. They thought that it was incredibly beautiful, and if you paid close attention on the Apollo capsule when it was at the museum last summer, you could have seen the ports that they jettisoned their liquid waste through.

SM:     Yeah. It was interesting to learn about those because it must be a pretty complicated system, one of those things that you think, "Oh, it must be easy." But they need to maintain a seal on the capsule so that, you know, nothing else goes out except what is intended. Then, you also have the problem of the waste freezing before it can reach the end of the tube, as it were, to get out.

BM:     Yeah. So, I haven't studied how that works on Apollo extensively, but on the space shuttle, they actually had heaters lining the tubes so that the liquid would not freeze as it exited the space shuttle.

00:06:56

SM:     So, in Mercury, they used the roll-on cuff?

BM:     Yes.

SM:     And then, by the time they'd gotten to the later programs, Gemini and Apollo, they're now using that, but then jettisoning what is collected out instead of collecting it and taking it back down?

BM:     Right. I couldn't find very much data on Mercury. They were not originally designed for liquid waste, but it was not a reusable capsule. So, it's possible that later versions of the Mercury did have the ability to jettison liquid waste.

SM:     Once you started getting into those later programs, it stopped being a solo operation. How did that change things, if at all?

BM:     Well, it didn't.

SM:     Did people just get really comfortable with each other?

BM:     They just got to be besties. The biggest change between Mercury and Gemini and Mercury and Apollo is suddenly the missions were lasting longer than 24 hours. The longest Gemini mission was 34 hours.

00:07:57

BM:     What they were dealing with starting with Gemini was the possibility of solid waste.

SM:     Whole new part of the equation then?

BM:     Yes, a whole new part of the equation. Solid waste, just perhaps, even less pleasant than the liquid waste. They didn't really have a huge infrastructure for dealing with solid waste. Basically, what they had was a little bag with some stick-um on the open part that they would attach to their butt, and then, they would go. And they often had separation issues because there's no gravity to help pull the waste away from your body. They also had a finger cuff so that they could scrape things into their bags with stick-um, which later came to be known as Apollo bags.

SM:     Did stuff ever get out? I imagine with zero gravity like that it's just a whole mess.

BM:     Yes, actually. So, there were occasionally some issues with waste escaping on Apollo 10, which took place in May of 1969. If you go and you look on the transcripts for that mission, you'll see the astronauts talking about a floating turd and repeatedly disavowing that the turd could possibly be theirs because it isn't sticky enough.

SM:     Hey. This is Sean briefly interrupting the interview to share some of the actual audio of the Apollo 10 mission. There are two recordings that were made of astronauts during the Apollo missions. There was the one that you might be familiar with through mission control that was official and everyone knew it was going to be broadcast out to the American public. So, it was kept squeaky clean to be consistent with the astronaut image.

00:09:49

SM:     There was also a second recording made of the internal communications between the three astronauts in the command capsule. This one was not meant to be broadcast out, so while most of it is a lot of technobabble as they execute their missions, there's also a lot of very colorful un‑astronaut-y language and discussions that took place. Here's a clip of the Apollo 10 astronauts on this second recording talking about, shall we say, an identified flying object one of them found floating inside the capsule.

ASTRONAUT 1:        Who did it?

ASTRONAUT 2:        Who did what?

ASTRONAUT 3:        What?

A1:      Who did it? Give me, give me a napkin quick. There's a turd floating around.

A2:      I didn't do it. It ain't one of mine.

A3:      I don't think it's one of mine.

A1:      Mine was a little more sticky than that.

00:10:42

A2:      God Almighty. Here's another goddamn turd. What's the matter with you guys? Here. Give me a—

A1:      Was it just floating around?

A3:      Yes.

SM:     Now, tied into this though, did NASA also, kind of, try to carefully control their diets to make this as minimal as possible?

BM:     Yes. Yes, they did. In addition to it being extremely gross, there was also the onerous task of massage your feces with a decontamination pill inside of the bag with it to ensure that it's going to kill all of the bacteria and it isn't going to make anybody sick. And so, the astronauts really, really, really hated it, and as a result, they would eat, like, a really, really high fiber diet before they would launch so that they could put off pooping as long as possible. And then, once they were in space, they also had specialized diets that would make it easier for things to happen.

SM:     That still relatively true today?

BM:     They do still have specialized diets that they have onboard the International Space Station, and they also had specialized diets onboard the space shuttle, which is mostly to ensure that your digestive track stays health and continues to function properly without the assistance of gravity. But I do not know if they still try to avoid pooping for as long as possible.

00:12:20

BM:     Since they're launching on Soyuz, I assume that they try to avoid pooping while they're on Soyuz.

SM:     So, the first toilet doesn't come around, you said, until Skylab, which is in the '70s.

BM:     Right. Skylab was the first United States space station, and it has astronauts onboard between 1973 and 1974. It burned up in the atmosphere in 1979. And they had basically the exact same system for liquid waste, except that it was mounted in a wall now instead of being part of a bag that you just attached to yourself. They had their solid waste mechanism was also in the wall. Unlike toilets here on Earth, this is not a toilet that you sit on. This is a toilet that you stand next to.

SM:     Not that it would matter in zero gravity, right? It's all just whatever.

BM:     Right. It had a seatbelt that you would use to attach yourself next to it so you wouldn't float away from it, and it operated with suction to make sure that all of the waste is going in the correct direction and isn't going to be floating back out into the living area. There was a series of fans and vacuums that would make sure that it was going in the right direction. Skylab is a pretty interesting case because on Skylab they wanted to do experiments on the waste and do analysis of the waste. And so, there had to be a way to harvest it, which is not true in any of the previous missions, where they were mostly focused on decontaminating it so that it wouldn't harm the astronauts.

00:14:01

BM:     And it isn't true on the space shuttle and it mostly isn't true on the International Space Station either. So, that's a pretty interesting thing.

SM:     The most expensive stool sample in history.

BM:     Yeah, pretty much.

SM:     What did the astronauts think of this? A lot of the astronauts had been on previous missions too, so they had used the old system.

BM:     Yes. So, especially with Skylab, Apollo ended barely before Skylab begun. And so, most of the astronauts on Skylab had also flown on earlier missions, and they were pretty enamored with this toilet. They thought that it was great. It was especially great when they compared it to Apollo and Gemini.

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00:14:54

SM:     Thank you for tuning into this episode of The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. Special thanks for those who have continued to support the museum and the podcast financially. For details on how to keep the podcast going, head to museumofflight.org/podcast and click the "Support the Podcast" Button. I hope you found this conversation with Brenda illuminating, if nothing else. We got a lot of questions about space and bathrooms, and that makes sense because everyone's got to do it at some point. And so, it's one of those things that's pretty fun to talk about because, truly, just about every human on Earth can relate to it.

In the next episode, I will be joined again by Brenda to talk about some of the more modern tech with space toilets, including the toilet on the space shuttled used until very recently and what happens for bathroom situations on the International Space Station. If you want to tour the NASA full-fuselage trainer in person at the Museum of Flight, as we release this episode, the museum is open in a very limited capacity as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. So, sadly, the trainer is off limits right now, but keep your eyes on museumofflight.org for the most up-to-date details on reopening, how to get your tickets, and what will be open when you visit. Eventually, you will have a chance to walk around inside the trainer for yourself. In the meantime, you can check out our fully walkable 3D scan of the space shuttle trainer on our website, and I'll put a link in the show notes. This is more than just a 3D panoramic view. You can actually click around and virtually walk through the space.

If you like what you heard, please rate and review the podcast on Apple podcasts or wherever you downloaded us from. You can contact the show at podcast@museumofflight.org. And until next time, this is your host Sean Mobley saying to everyone out there on that good Earth see you out there, folks.

END OF PODCAST