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Let's talk space toilets

103 points by zdw

by gritspants

1 subcomments

I've often wondered - what is the exact amount of vacuum (pressure?) that you can get away with without disemboweling someone?

by detourdog

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I was surprised there were no pictures of the actual toilets. Would love more but found this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_toilet

by assimpleaspossi

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I've always wondered about regular toilets and now this. Someone has to test it. I'm sure they have equivalent items to run through them but, eventually, you have to try the real thing so whose job is it to do that and how do they do that?

by xzenor

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That was an oddly interesting article.. I never thought about doing your business in space.

by ooterness

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Is it simpler to build a better space toilet, or to build a ship with centrifugal gravity and use a regular toilet?

by bdamm

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The roasting process is both hypermodern and curiously antique. Burning dung is a tradition passed down across the millenia!

by gambiting

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And as someone else said....the entire business would be solved if not for our cultural tabboo that requires astronauts to do the whole procedure by themselves. If you could have another crew member actively helping it would be done quicker in a much more hygenic way. But because it's "private" they have to do these crazy acrobatics to do it alone. And like, back on Earth nurses have to do much much worse stuff every day and no one considers that weird - it's just part of the job.

by nozzlegear

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> One piece of feedback from Skylab was that the toilet needed stronger airflow. This meant the Shuttle toilet opening had to be narrow. To practice correctly positioning their body, astronauts on Earth sat on a special training mockup with a camera mounted in the center of the waste tube. A successful docking with the device meant precisely centering one’s nether eye in the crosshairs of a video screen while crewmates looked on and yelled their encouragement.
I knew part of the job for astronauts is being intimate with one's crewmates, but I didn't know it was that intimate.

by ambicapter

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by the_af

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This story of space toilers clears out many questions I had about spaceflight and... uh, going number 2.
Namely: astronauts try NOT to as much as they can, and when they do go, it's a mess for both them and their crew mates. They suffer through it because being in space is a worthy achievement.
Apparently it's such a mess that NASA estimates this is why astronauts tend to undereat. Apparently Gemini 7's Frank Borman spent 9 days without going number 2 because of this, and planned to hold it in 2 full weeks (the article doesn't clarify whether he managed). Skylab seems to have done some progress, but we're still in the early eras of space toiletry!

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by nQQKTz7dm27oZ

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