 Of all the completely bonkers stories of the early shuttle era, you probably haven't heard about the time there was floating dehydrated fecal matter, or poop dust, inside the main crew cabin during re-entry. But yeah, that's a real thing that happened. If you're anything like me, every time you see somebody in an insane situation, be it underwater in a submarine in a movie, or you see inside a spacecraft and realize people actually flew to the moon in this thing, and think, how did they go to the bathroom? I mean, it's totally natural everybody does it, so it's natural to wonder how they do it in different environments. On Apollo missions, it wasn't exactly the nicest of things to do. They didn't have a toilet. Instead, they had a fecal containment units, or more simply, plastic bags with a sticky bit around the end. Going to the bathroom on Apollo missions was one of the least pleasant things you could maybe possibly imagine. There was no toilet on board. Instead, they had a fecal containment unit, which, more simply, was a plastic bag with a sticky bit around the end. To use the makeshift facilities, astronauts would first strip down naked because there wasn't any extra water on board to clean up if things got messy. Once the astronaut who had to go was naked, and while the other two men were cowering in the corner to stay as far away as possible from the activity and the smell, he would stick the bag to his bare buttocks, then he would go into the bag. But because there was no gravity to physically separate the fecal matter from the buttocks, there was a little thing inside the bag where you could put your fingers in it. It was protected. It wasn't bare, so that you would physically separate the material from your person and push it down towards the bottom of the bag. When he was done, the astronaut would wipe and clean up as best as possible, put everything into the bag, seal it up, then squish it. The bag had a chemical inside it that was a desiccant, so it would actually take the moisture out of the fecal matter and also neutralize odors, because they couldn't jettison solid waste overboard. They had to keep it on board, stowed with them, throughout the mission. It wasn't super pleasant to keep fecal matter on board, so astronauts got rid of it if they could. They left it on the moon, and in the case of Apollo 10, they somewhat infamously left as much as they could inside the lunar module's ascent stage, which is currently orbiting the sun. To make it so astronauts would have to go less frequently on Apollo missions, they ate a low-residue diet, which basically made it so they didn't have to use the bathroom very often on the two-week mission to the moon. But a low-residue diet can only be done for so long. It's not healthy to stop the body's natural cycle of absorbing nutrients from food and creating waste, and so as missions got longer with Skylab and looking ahead at space shuttle missions, NASA engineers had to figure out a way to make facilities in space more user-friendly, because if you're in space for four, five, six months, that is a lot of fecal matter to store. The original toilet developed for the space shuttle was designed to use airflow rather than gravity to move waste around, and it was also meant to be as natural as possible for what we're used to on Earth. To use this toilet, astronauts would sit as well as they could in microgravity and use the facilities as normal. Inside the bowl, fast-flowing air and a high-speed slinger would collect and propel waste material shoving it to the side of the bowl. From there, fans would generate strong enough airflow to separate liquid from solid waste. The liquid waste was dumped overboard, and the solid waste was vacuum-dried by exposure to space and then stored on board. The whole system relied on a series of pumps and fans as well as filters to neutralize odor and block bacteria. When it worked, it worked brilliantly. The problem was, it just didn't work. The first shuttle flight saw an airflow problem. One of the charcoal filters had become flooded, as did a fan, and this in turn destroyed the odor and bacteria filter. The system on the whole was unable to collect and retain waste, and the airflow problem meant it couldn't separate liquid from solid material. The whole system became so clogged that it was unusable by the end of the flight, but luckily they had the old Apollo-era fecal containment systems on board as a backup measure. But there was another problem that emerged on this flight, something engineers on Earth hadn't anticipated. When the fecal waste was exposed to the vacuum of space to freeze-dry it, it tended to generate a little bit of dust. That dust was generally contained with the rest of the fecal matter that was now freeze-dried, but when the system malfunctioned, a little bit of that dust got into the spacecraft's ventilation system. That same ventilation system serviced the main crew cabin, which meant a little bit of that fecal dust made it into contact with the astronauts, which you may think is just gross, but in reality it's actually really dangerous. If that fecal dust were to come into contact with, say, an eyeball, or if the astronauts were to breathe it in such that it came in contact with their lungs, both eyeballs and lungs are quite moist. This would reconstitute that dust into fecal matter inside the human body. But in the end that didn't happen and the crew of STS-1 was perfectly fine, and in fact their main complaint with the space commode was that it didn't do an adequate job of separating fecal matter from their buttocks in space, so there was still more work to be done on space toilets. The engineering behind space commodes was revisited in the wake of the floating fecal dust incident, and a new, much simpler toilet was debuted in 1984 on STS-41D. Currently on the International Space Station, astronauts are able to compress their fecal matter and jettison it overboard without a problem, which is so much nicer than having to keep it stored on board. What other very human things do you guys wonder about when it comes to spaceflight? Leave me all of your questions, thoughts and comments in the comment section down below. 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