"In general, the Apollo waste management system worked satisfactorily from an engineering standpoint. From the point of view of crew acceptance, however, the system must be given poor marks. The principal problem with both the urine and fecal collection systems was the fact that these required more manipulation than crewmen were used to in the Earth environment and were, as a consequence, found to be objectionable. The urine receptacle assembly represented an attempt to preclude crew handling of urine specimens but, because urine spills were frequent, the objective of “sanitizing” the process was thwarted.

The fecal collection system presented an even more distasteful set of problems. The collection process required a great deal of skill to preclude escape of feces from the collection bag and consequent soiling of the crew, their clothing, or cabin surfaces. The fecal collection process was, moreover, extremely time consuming because of the level of difficulty involved with use of the system. An Apollo 7 astronaut estimated the time required to correctly accomplish the process at 45 minutes.* Good placement of fecal bags was difficult to attain; this was further complicated by the fact that the flap at the back of the constant wear garment created an opening that was too small for easy placement of the bags.** As was noted earlier, kneading of the bags was required for dispersal of the germicide.

*Entry in the log of Apollo 7 by Astronaut Walter Cunningham.

**The configuration of the constant wear garments on later Apollo missions were modified to correct this problem."

1: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19760005603/downloads/19...

I found the language NASA and the astronauts used to communicate absolutely hilarious - "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!"

Glad they got it working - best of luck to Atemis II mission!

Apparently one of the down sides about the previous system was that the separation of solid and liquid excreta ideally required someone to separate their excretion of both kinds. Apparently this is something that male astronauts found much much easier than female ones. Artemis's toilet can handle both at the same time.

I still think they have the good old fashioned Maximum Absorbency Garment for space walks though. (CF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Absorbency_Garment)

You would enter it, activate it, wait until it accelerated to a certain RPM, do the thing, then deactivate it and it would decelerate until it is stationary relative to the rest of the ship again.

I wonder, how expensive it would be to build this for real.

The rotation mechanism could use a flywheel. Let's say, an electric motor spins the toilet section and the flywheel in opposite directions. So that the rest of the ship is not disturbed.

Size and weight are obviously issues, I just wonder how much would be the overhead. I wonder if the real spaceship designers considered this possibility.

https://sites.google.com/site/theageofplastic3d/2001s-zero-g...

toilets are as important as rockets. and oftentimes because they're unsexy, more difficult to solve for. after all, i remember neil armstrong, but not the person who made this modern amenity in my own household.

what a wild rabbit hole

[0] https://youtu.be/pJQGJmYKWZ0?t=131

But seriously, although I guess it’s fair to say that errors will occur, still: they couldn’t get the plumbing right?

For liquid waste. This was not exactly the case for solid waste. Effectively it was just a tank. It had something like a "net" in it, this was connected to a shaft, through a gear, to another shaft at the front of the seat. The commander would, every 7 days or so, "actuate the mechanism" to rotate the net and to gather all the waste and compact it into one side of the toilet.

Many commanders said this was the most stressful part of the mission as the mechanism was somewhat delicate and could easily break. In that case you had to don a glove and manually do the work the net was otherwise doing.

If that completely failed, yes, the shuttle had backup "Apollo bags" stored in the middeck lockers.

I wondered why the Artemis crew module weighs twice as much as the Apollo module after 60 years of scientific progress and developments in materials science and aerospace engineering, now I am starting to understand. Plastic bags "worked", not great but they are super light, essentially you are not going to get much lighter than a plastic bag for containing and disposing of waste. On the other hand, that toilet looks insanely overbuilt, how strong do you need the seat to be??

Maybe they can position the astronauts behind it for use as a last-ditch heat shield.

This story reminds be of the tale where during the space race the Americans created a super space pen that works in zero degrees kelvin and vacuum, and the Russians used a pencil.