Artemis II is going so well that we’re left to talk about frozen urine

The Orion spacecraft is now much closer to the Moon than Earth on its 10-day journey into deep space and back, and overall everything is going smashingly well.

Things are going so well that, during the daily mission briefings at Johnson Space Center in Houston, there’s just not that much of substance to talk about. So the discourse keeps coming back to, of all things, the toilet on board Orion.

As you may recall, there were some toilet problems in the initial hours of the mission. During the initial checkout of spacecraft systems, Orion’s toilet was supposed to be “wetted” with water to prime the pump. Not enough water was introduced, so the pump was non-responsive. Once more water was added, it began functioning fine.

It was a minor blip, but the Internet went crazy for crap for about 24 hours.

A new problem emerges

By Friday night there was another problem. Urine is collected in a small tank, about the size of an office trash can. From there it is supposed to be vented into space, which is to say dumped overboard to sail around the cosmos until the end of time. However, flight controllers noted that astronaut pee had frozen in the tank. There were no issues with using the toilet for no. 2, but no. 1 was a no-go.

To address the problem Orion was maneuvered into an orientation such that the urine tank and vent lines received the maximum amount of sunshine to un-freeze the urine. This helped a little bit, but did not entirely solve the problem. So for now, the astronauts are continuing to pee into, essentially, bags.

During Saturday’s news conference the chair of the Mission Management Team, a NASA engineer named John Honeycutt, was asked about the public fascination with Orion’s toilet.

He said he understood the interest. “I think the fixation on the toilet is kind of human nature,” he said. Honeycutt added that it is not a mission risk, but said if the astronauts were essentially camping out in space, the current setup makes the whole situation a little more difficult. “I know we’re in a good state, but I would really like it to be in the best state it can be,” he said.

It is worth noting that space toilets are difficult. On Earth there is plenty of water and gravity to help with the process of going to the bathroom. In space it is much more challenging. The Apollo astronauts simply used bags. The toilet on the space shuttle did break from time to time. There are four toilets on the International Space Station, where there is more volume and plenty of recycled water to work with, so it is less of an issue.

Space toilets ultimately need to work

This is not a trivial matter.

One can get away with “roughing it” when using the bathroom during trips to the Moon. Going to Mars, requiring months in space, is a different matter. If the toilet breaks on the way to Mars, there is a non-zero chance the crew is dying. So it’s great to try out these systems now, on Orion. This really is the purpose of this test flight, to make sure life support systems work for the crew, to identify problems, and to implement fixes in the future.

In the big picture, the Artemis II mission continues to go splendidly. The deputy manager of the Orion program for NASA, Debbie Korth, said Saturday that the spacecraft is performing “remarkably well,” and that the vehicle’s overall performance has “pleasantly surprised” the engineers working on the program.

Everything is going so well, in fact, that much of the focus has been on frozen urine. And considering all of the things that could go wrong with a dangerous deep space journey like this, a wee problem like this seems like a big win.