NASA spent over $90 billion to send a new crew to the moon, but they forgot to check the toilet

The four-person crew aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission can finally breathe a sigh of relief, or at least use the restroom, after flight controllers successfully guided them through fixing a jammed toilet fan just hours into their historic deep-space lunar flyby. Mission specialist Christina Koch, the sole woman on the 10-day journey, first reported the issue to Mission Control shortly after the breathtaking liftoff from Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday.

NASA spokesperson Gary Jordan confirmed the problem during live mission commentary, explaining that the toilet fan was jammed. According to the NY Post, ground teams immediately sprang into action, working to provide instructions on how the crew could access and clear the area to get the high-tech toilet back online. 

Norm Knight, NASA’s director of flight operations, later clarified that the malfunction stemmed from a controller issue within the toilet system. While the toilet could still handle “number two,” it was temporarily out of commission for “number one,” which certainly isn’t ideal when you’re in a cramped spacecraft hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth.

Well, ‘holding your bladder’ just got a whole new meaning

In the interim, the astronauts had to rely on their contingency “waste management capabilities specifically for urine.” Hours after Koch initially reported the problem, flight controllers walked her through the necessary steps to get the system up and running again. Koch’s calm report back to Houston, “Integrity, good checkout,” confirmed the fix was successful. Mission Control radioed back, saying, “Happy to report that toilet is go for use.” 

Then, adding to a category of sentences I never thought I’d read, Mission Control provided some practical advice: “We do recommend letting the system get to operating speed before donating fluid, and then letting it run a little bit after donation.” On one hand, this fix is a testament to NASA’s teamwork and the difficulty of space travel, but I can’t stop cracking up at how such a basic necessity was missed in such an expensive mission.

This specific toilet is actually quite special. In a video tour, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, one of the four crew members, highlighted that having a toilet with a door on such a tiny spacecraft was a real luxury for the crew. Hansen even described it as “the one place we can go during the mission where we can actually feel like we’re alone for a moment.”

He explained that to use a zero-gravity toilet, astronauts float into the phone-booth-sized stall, using a hose to dispose of urine, while for solid waste, they perch on an industrial-looking toilet seat. The feces gets sucked down into a bag, which is then sealed off and squished into a canister. These canisters will journey back to Earth for proper disposal once the mission concludes. Urine, on the other hand, is simply flushed out into the vastness of space. 

Per Reuters, the Artemis II mission itself is a monumental undertaking, representing the United States’ boldest stride yet toward returning humans to the moon. In fact, it has been 53 years since astronauts traveled into the vicinity of the moon, and is a crucial step in the ongoing space race with China. It is crewed by NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, alongside Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. 

The Artemis program, a multibillion-dollar venture established in 2017, is designed to build a long-term U.S. presence on the moon, to serve as a vital stepping stone for future missions to Mars. Partners around the world have been working towards this end goal, even researching reproduction in space. The first test after liftoff was to manually steer the spacecraft, to test the maneuverability and control capability of the ship, in case the automated system fails. 

The Artemis I mission was unmanned. Now, the Artemis II mission will send its four-person crew an incredible 252,000 miles (406,000 km) into space. The current record for the farthest spaceflight, approximately 248,000 miles, is held by the three-man crew of the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970.