“It’s an issue with dumping the waste out of the toilet,” Flight Director Judd Frieling said recently. “And so it appears to me that we probably have some frozen urine in the vent line.” Think about that for a second. You’ve got the brightest engineers on the planet, people who build multi-billion dollar rockets, suddenly huddled around consoles trying to figure out how to thaw a frozen pipe full of pee. It’s actually kind of funny, or maybe it’s just the reality of space travel that we don’t talk about enough. Our smartest minds, really just trying to figure out how to warm up, well, you know.
Beautiful. Truly, that’s where the cutting edge of science is at right now. The astronauts on Artemis II had to get creative to solve the clog—they actually rotated the spacecraft toward the sun to melt the blockage. A bit of solar heating, space-style. It worked, mostly. Or at least it cleared enough that they could get back to business. Wait, was it fully cleared? Actually, it wasn’t quite ready until later.
It was only by Sunday night that Mission Control finally confirmed the vent lines were good to go. “You are go for all types of use of the toilet,” Mission Control’s Jacki Mahaffey radioed up to the crew.
All bowel systems go, I guess.
There’s this faint smell of sterile lab air whenever I write about this stuff, contrasted against the messy reality of living in a tin can floating in the void. You’d think the future of space exploration would be all about warp drives or discovering alien life, but sometimes it’s just about making sure the plumbing works. According to Misryoum, the crew spent quite a bit of time—more than they probably wanted—fiddling with the hardware before they finally cleared the path. If you’re really curious, there’s footage of the whole thing online where they dump their waste into space. Science, right? It’s rarely as glamorous as the movies make it look. Sometimes you just have to deal with the basics.