They’re gonna aim for the stars.
NASA’s Artemis II four crew members will blast off April 1 for a 10-day trip around of the moon — in a camper‑sized space capsule with their prized new private space toilet.
“We’re pretty fortunate as a crew to have a toilet with a door on this tiny spacecraft,” Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen said in a recent video tour.
“(It’s) the one place we can go during the mission where we can actually feel like we’re alone for a moment,” he added.
The new‑fangled “hygiene bay” is hidden behind a hatch on the floor of the Orion space capsule.
Astronauts will float into the phone‑booth‑sized stall, use a hose to dispose of urine and perch on an industrial‑looking toilet seat to go No. 2.
“The feces gets sucked down into the bottom into a bag, and you close that off and squish it down into the canister,” Hansen explained. Those canisters, the worst carry-ons imaginable, will ride back to Earth for disposal after the mission is over.
The astronauts plan to flush their urine out into the final frontier.
“You have a urine hose,” Hansen said. “It gets collected, and a few times a day, we vent that urine to space.”
The lunar loo, designed by Lockheed Martin, is a far cry from the condom-like urine-collecting apparatus Apollo crews used more than 50 years ago.
During that era, astronauts managed solid waste with plastic fecal collection bags and relieved themselves using “roll‑on” external catheters connected by tubing to urine bags — usually with little privacy from their crewmates.
Artemis II’s crew — NASA commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and mission specialist Hansen — will have just 330 cubic feet of habitable space, roughly the size of two minivans, during the mission.
The astronauts said in a video briefing from quarantine on Sunday that the cramped quarters are worth it for the chance to push human exploration.
“Answering the question of whether we are alone starts at the moon,” Koch said. “It’s a stepping stone to Mars, where we might have the most likely likelihood of finding evidence of past life.”
“At the end of the day, it’s humanity’s call to go explore, to do these things, and then to share them with the world and to motivate,” Wiseman added.
