NASA Purchases $19M Russian Space Toilet

Gary writes "NASA has paid $19 million for a Russian-built international space station toilet system. The toilet system, similar to the one already in use in the station's Zvezda Service Module, is scheduled to arrive at the space station in 2008 and will offer more privacy for a crew expected to double from three to six by 2009. The space station toilet physically resembles those used on Earth, except it has leg restraints and thigh bars to keep astronauts and cosmonauts from floating away. NASA says purchasing the multi million dollar toilet is a bargain compared to developing one from scratch."

Re:Wow!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Oh c'mon - if you're going to make a joke about this article, how could you possibly leave the gem-filled last paragraph out?

Fans suck waste into the commode. Crew members also have individual urine funnels which are attached to hoses, and the urine is automatically transferred to a U.S. device that can generate potable water.

There's so much to work with here :-).

Re:In soviet Russia...

[kannibal_klown]

Toilets flush money down you? I guess NASA learned a lesson after the incident where Russian cosmonauts decided to simply use pencils instead of spending millions developing a zero-g pen

That is a myth. In actuality a company went on their own to develop it and offered it to NASA (who later started buying them).

See here: Space Pen [wikipedia.org].

Re:But but but

[WolfWithoutAClause]

IRC the shuttle one just collects the waste, and the waste is disposed of on the ground. Don't forget that the Shuttle is only on orbit for a couple of weeks max.

The Russian system is actually a full sewage system, and turns the urine back into drinking water. That saves launch costs at ~20,000/kgon the water. With 3-6 astronauts up there it pays to do this.

And it's unlikely that NASA could do this, the R&D alone would be more than that, and this is a full working toilet/waste reclaimation system.

Re:If you need restraints...

[hcdejong]

regarding standing up...

It seems to me you'd want to minimise leakage. On earth spattering the surroundings is an annoyance [1], in space it can be catastrophic. Why take the chance?

1: that said, I've never understood why so many men insist on peeing standing up, when it's cleaner, more comfortable and doesn't cost more time to sit down.

Re:But but but

[Tin_Wisdom]

As others have mentioned, the shuttle shitter is not a recycling unit, it is effectively a port-o-potty that stores the waste until the shuttle lands. The Russian model recycles the water, good for a system to be used on a long-term orbiting platform.

NASA had developed a recycling toilet back in the 1990's for use on the space station, but compared to the Russian model, it sucked... or didn't properly suck, depending on your point of view. The Russian design is far more efficient, costs less and has the notable advantage of being tested and refined over the course of 20 years of service on Mir and Salyut stations.

An editorial comment on NASA vs. the Russian space agency:

NASA is run by retired astronauts, RSA is run by military leaders appointed by the State. Astronauts tend to view everything as human-centric (on manned missions), while the Russian leaders tend to look at the mission first and the crew second. Thus NASA has a safety-first mindset and one that puts the comfort of the crew (within reason) before efficiency.

When NASA was developing the space toilet in the 80's, they came up with a design similar to the one the Russians had been using on their space stations for almost 20 years. It involved hoses and baggies. Presented to an astronaut advisory board (think "focus group"), the male astronaut reaction was almost universally "I ain't stickin' my boys in no hose!" and the design was scrapped in favor of a brutally inefficient design involving membranes, baffles and a gentle pressure differential.

Faced with similar reaction in the Russian (then Soviet) cosmonauts, one can only imagine that the answer was along the lines of "You will stick what we tell you to stick where we tell you to stick it, Comrade!"

Re:If you need restraints...

[adisakp]

that said, I've never understood why so many men insist on peeing standing up, when it's cleaner, more comfortable and doesn't cost more time to sit down.

Woman, you're wrong on all three counts of cleanliness, comfortability, and time. Let me explain to you a little about the world of men.

1) It's not cleaner for *US* to sit down on a dirty toilet and make contact between the toilet and our ass.

- Regarding number one - you've obviously never seen the toilets in a mens public bathroom. If you were a man using one, you'd probably have to find one that was flushed or flush it yourself, then touch the lid to put it down, then spend a couple minutes wiping the lid down (from the guys who missed the bowl previously), then you'd want to put a paper seat cover down (if they had one. It's not hygenic for the person going to the bathroom and it's an involved process if you want it to be remotely non-disgusting.

2) Another note about men's bathrooms: there's often stuff missing -- the stalls often don't have doors so you feel more "exposed" pissing sitting down than standing up, the toilets sometimes are missing lids so sitting down isn't even always an option, and toilet paper seems to have a 50%+ chance of being non-existant.

- Another note, even though "stuff" is missing, *SHIT* isn't missing. Sometimes you can have 10 toilets and all of them are clogged with shit and toilet paper and none will flush without overflowing!

3) It's a lot faster. Have you ever noticed how about 250 guys can pee out their beers in a stadium (they have piss troughs) in the same time that about 15 women can get through the ladies line.