The ISS Is Getting a New Toilet This Year (space.com) 92
Later this year, the International Space Station will receive a new and improved toilet system designed to bridge the gap between current lavatorial space tech and what humans will need to make extended visits to, say, Mars, in comfort. Space.com reports: It has a fancier name, of course; officially, the commode is NASA's Universal Waste Management System (UWMS). The launch is targeted for no earlier than the fall, a NASA spokesperson confirmed to Space.com, although the agency is still determining what spacecraft will carry the new plumbing up. The toilet currently on offer on the U.S. side of the space station was designed in the 1990s and based on its shuttle counterpart, according to a detailed review of space toiletry. But the apparatus has its flaws. It can be clunky to use, particularly for women, and it is "sensitive to crew alignment on the seat," sometimes resulting in messes, according to that review.
So NASA has tried to keep the aspects that have gotten positive reviews while trimming mass and volume and making some design changes, like adjusting the shape of the seat and replacing the apparatus that compresses the waste. Another change mimics a feature of the toilet on the Russian side of the space station, where astronauts simply hook their feet into toe bars, rather than the thigh bars used on the American equivalent to anchor the astronaut in the microgravity environment. The UWMS will remain on the space station for the rest of the orbiting laboratory's lifetime, and a second toilet of the same model will fly on the Orion capsule that astronauts use to fly around the moon on the first crewed Artemis mission in NASA's ambitious lunar return plan, according to the agency.
So NASA has tried to keep the aspects that have gotten positive reviews while trimming mass and volume and making some design changes, like adjusting the shape of the seat and replacing the apparatus that compresses the waste. Another change mimics a feature of the toilet on the Russian side of the space station, where astronauts simply hook their feet into toe bars, rather than the thigh bars used on the American equivalent to anchor the astronaut in the microgravity environment. The UWMS will remain on the space station for the rest of the orbiting laboratory's lifetime, and a second toilet of the same model will fly on the Orion capsule that astronauts use to fly around the moon on the first crewed Artemis mission in NASA's ambitious lunar return plan, according to the agency.
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"Anyway, wasn't the old toilet named the "Colbert"? Is that name going to transfer to the new model?"
No it's the exercise machine that's called 'Colbert'.
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Re: First! (Score:5, Funny)
"Richard Garriott talks space toilets" (Score:1)
Spaaace Toooilets ooon... Mars? (Score:2)
I've got to wonder what it has to do with Mars or the Moon though. You have gravity there, which means traditional Earth toilets will work just fine, though splashing may be more of a problem.
They'll certainly be handy for the interplanetary voyage, but I expect you'd want something very different (and a lot more pleasant to use) once you got there.
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You may have gravity, but
(1) No plumbing anywhere, so you still need to capture and process it the same way and
(2) Water is going to be a valuable resource, so nobody is going to "waste" it on flushing a toilet. (Unless there is an undiscovered river of water we haven't found yet)
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> No plumbing anywhere, so you still need to capture and process it the same way and ... or in any of a wide range of *other* ways. Toilets pre-date plumbing by thousands of years, and there are many modern versions of relatively low-tech, water-free composting toilets (which is basically what you're going to have regardless of the capturing process - that organic material is far to valuable to throw away)
The big challenge on the ISS is not capturing waste, but doing so in free fall, where gravity doesn
This is all very complicated (Score:1)
They have a toilet which collects waste from the personnel, compresses it and then jettisons it outside. Why not save weight and install a butt-shaped mini airlock? Install your derriere in the inner opening, and when the seal is tight, open the outer door and crap outside directly.
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The real problem though is the 1 atmosphere pressure difference. Such a device would be lethal in a very unpleasant way.
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Yeah, sit there scrolling reddit and your guts become one with the universe.
Ewww.
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As opposed to your soul becoming one with the universe from scrolling reddit and dying inside when done terrestrially?
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The skin should be able to withstand 1 bar of pressure difference.
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Skin yes. You guts, quite a different thing.
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Withstand? Possibly. Not suffer from? Not a chance.
Think of the worst hickey you've ever seen - then realize that was caused by considerably less than 1 bar of pressure difference. Then imagine getting much worse skin damage all over your sensitive bits every time you used the loo. Probably not lethal (at least not right away), but as others have mentioned our internal bits are considerably less well armored.
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Probably not even that much of a problem, only unpleasant. Well, likely a serious problem on repeated exposure.
But you would not get to that. The killer is that your insides are in no way designed to withstand being sucked out by a perfect vacuum and when one is applied, they do not stay inside unless you make them using available musculature. That is not really an option on the toilet as it defeats the purpose.
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Pink balloon syndrome
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Re:This is all very complicated (Score:4, Informative)
They have a toilet which collects waste from the personnel, compresses it and then jettisons it outside.
The waste is not jettisoned. It is collected and loaded into Progress for disposal.
If the poop was jettisoned, it would be as dangerous as any other space debris, with a delta-v of 1000s of meters per second relative to other satellites.
Re:This is all very complicated (Score:5, Funny)
If the poop was jettisoned, it would be as dangerous as any other space debris, with a delta-v of 1000s of meters per second relative to other satellites.
Shit hitting a fan has nothing on a kinetic shitbomb.
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But it would be fun seeing it included in space debris conjunction assessments.
NASA Calls SpaceX: "Hey Elon, you better maneuver that Starlink satellite a bit it's gonna get hit by poop"
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Not if they used it for thrust. The station has to be refueled for thrusters that keep the orbit from decaying. If they fired the turds out the back to hard enough, the turds "orbit" would basically stop, and it would fall straight down. Load it into aluminum cans and fire it out a rail gun?
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Aside from the other problems with your idea, I'm pretty sure they never jettisoned solid waste outside, only liquid. Jettisoning solid waste outside generates orbital space junk and isn't safe. Frankly, the liquid waste doesn't seem like a good idea either. In theory it sublimates and doesn't form solid, frozen chunks, but I'm not sure how guaranteed that is. Anyway, they have systems for recycling the water now, so I don't think they jettison waste anymore.
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No need for expensive space tech for that. All you need is a lot of gay sex and reddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/MakeM... [reddit.com]
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Am I the only one concerned about space doodie? (Score:3)
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NASA will just draw the astronaut corps from San Fransisco. They're used to it over there.
It seems to me (Score:2)
A whole range of space-related problems - toilets, but also eating / drinking, bone and muscular wasting... could be solved if the spacecraft spun enough to give a semblance of gravity. I wonder why NASA doesn't concentrate on solving that one problem: it would automatically alleviate or greatly reduce all the others.
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That would require a lot of effort. To have something that resembled a surface to walk on, you will need a giant wheel.
How about a counterweight (or second space station) connected by a very long cable. Then set the whole thing rotating. Long enough cable and you probably wouldn't even feel the spin. Docking could be done at the center point, then just climb down the cable.
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That's what these guys are trying to achieve: https://gatewayspaceport.com/ [gatewayspaceport.com]
They seem to have trouble getting out of the fantasy realm tough.
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That's way more complicated. I'm thinking just two equal mass pieces connected by a long cable.
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Keeping and maintaining equal mass will be the issue. A human moves from one end to the other will mean a 400lb change, with a moment arm longer than the cable. Being off even a few pounds will generate major oscillations in the rotation.
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Re:It seems to me (Score:4, Interesting)
Living in a spinning spacecraft the size of the ISS would be nauseating and very uncomfortable.
A spacecraft needs to be at least 30 meters in diameter before artificial gravity is feasible.
The diameter of the ISS is 4.2 meters.
A spinning living area will have difficulty interfacing with stuff that doesn't spin, such as antennas and solar panels.
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It's interesting though. The ISS core is about 100 meters long with about another 58 meters of modules perpendicular to that. If they designed it so that all of those modules went end to end in a loop, they could have made a rough circle with a diameter of about 52 meters. At 2 RPM that would be able to generate about an eigth of a G and pretty much anyone would be comfortable. At 3 RPM, that would generate about a quarter of a G and anyone who isn't really prone to seasickness would be fine. At 6 RPM, it w
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At 6 RPM people would be vomiting left and right. Not because of the spinning, but because of the visual stimulation at 6 Hz. And anyone remotely predisposed to seizures would have a very difficult time with the prolonged exposure. Unless you eliminate all windows of course, but (a) you'd eliminate a major source of good PR through the amazing views and photographs and (b) you still have the need for EVAs which, to put it lightly, would not be comfortable. Humans are not adept when their entire visual f
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I think you made a miscalculation there. It would be 0.1 Hz or once every ten seconds. Try pulling up a timer and drawing a circle in the air with your finger in ten seconds. I just did and it wasn't so bad. I don't think that wouldn't cause vomiting or seizures. As for EVAs, there are various ways to handle that. One is to simply stop the spin when you need to perform an EVA. If you don't, and the background is that distracting, there are workarounds. For example, you could equip the astronauts with augmen
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Alternatively, you could get some bases established on the moon where you could start mining for material. The work on building something much larger in Earth orbit with material that doesn't have to be drug up out of a gravity well.
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True, but there is a very important question that a station spinning to provide pseudo-gravity should be able to answer that a moonbase might not. That's if living in Mars-equivalent acceleration will lead to the same health issues (vision loss, bone depletion, etc.) as living in freefall. Or will some degree of gravity lead to no problems, or just a reduced set of problems, and if it still causes issues, can you mitigate some of them with weights placed on the body, medications, etc.? It's possible that we
Microgravity is the very point... (Score:3)
for running experiments on ISS, which is, at least in theory, the reason for its existence.
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As far as I know there are two main reasons why implementations on the centrifuge principle are usually rejected.
Crafts that operate on that principle would either have to be relatively large or spin very fast. The former comes with prohibitive costs and the latter has been deemed to be impractical.
Then you also have to deal with those pesky Netwonian physics like conversation of (angular) momentum, where the stability of
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And some additional info, so this post isn't wasted on a correction of grammar:
You can look up the Nautilus-X project for more information. A proposed space station design for deployment at Lagrange points L1 or L2 where they would be stationary, without an orbit, relative to their parent.
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Even a full G isn't exactly some massive force. It's not exactly hard to find engineers trained to work with forces in the range of 1 G. It's kind of hard to find engineers who aren't, as a matter of fact. Panels could go in the center, where the G forces are lower, or be built off a non-rotating central hub (or a rotating central hub with counter-rotating masts for panels/etc). As for firing thrusters in the correct direction to boost the station, those could go on the stationary masts off the hub, or they
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And a real nasty problem with that is that you can either spin part of the station giving you an unsolved engineering problem with the seals or you could spin the whole thing, giving you a stability nightmare. It is quite clear why they do _not_ spin.
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Wouldn't it be relatively stable, due to gyroscopic precession? I'd have thought (being an armchair orbital mechanics specialist) that adjusting position/orbit would be a nightmare. You'd have to use a motorcycle technique - "out-tracking", where you nudge the handlebars in the opposite direction, to make rapid course correction.
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Wouldn't it be relatively stable, due to gyroscopic precession? I'd have thought (being an armchair orbital mechanics specialist) that adjusting position/orbit would be a nightmare. You'd have to use a motorcycle technique - "out-tracking", where you nudge the handlebars in the opposite direction, to make rapid course correction.
The current design is not suited to be spun. The problem with one that spins well is that you have to build it in one go and then cannot really add to it, axis of gravity and all that. The ISS is a bunch of modules and for a good reason. Also, "rapid course correction"? No. It cannot do that at all.
Maybe in a few decades, a spinning design becomes viable, but not anytime soon.
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I wonder the same - and you wouldn't need to make much of it spin at all - if the only thing that really needs gravity is a toilet on one end of a stick, and a lab on the other end, you could just spin those to (say) 0.5G and then get to take a dump in some comfort and not pong out the lab at the other end.
As a know-nothing-spectator, it does feel like gravity is the one thing we've not really tried to do in space. I know it's not easy, but then not much in space is actually "easy".
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A whole range of space-related problems - toilets, but also eating / drinking, bone and muscular wasting... could be solved if the spacecraft spun enough to give a semblance of gravity.
One of the major goals of the ISS is to characterize the long-term human effects of microgravity. If it is determined that we need some gravity to survive long missions, there will then be a series of tests to determine how much of it will do. Will the Martian or the lunar constant be enough, or will it have to be a full Earth? Rotatable test vehicles will have to be designed to run such trials.
Naturally, the required gravitation constant we come up with will have a major effect on the architecture of futur
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>could be solved if the spacecraft spun enough to give a semblance of gravity. I wonder why NASA doesn't concentrate on solving that one problem: it would automatically alleviate or greatly reduce all the others.
"Spin gravity" could solve a lot of problems of living in the space station, but only at the price of making the space station pretty much useless.
Think about it - *why* does the space station exist? It's not just to give a handful of people a place to live in orbit. If that were the goal, then
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The whole point of the ISS is to study things and people in microgravity. There's no point in an Earth-orbiting research station that does have gravity.
For trips Mars and the outer solar system, sure, it'd be useful. But throwing resources at that would be putting the cart before the horse. There are so many bigger problems to solve before those missions can happen.
Space toilets on the loose... (Score:2)
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Finally? (Score:2)
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But we would probably end up calling the toilet Crappy McCrapface.
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Can it handle Mrs. Wolowitz's meatloaf?
Shitty news (Score:5, Funny)
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Well technically if you just flush the result into space it would freeze and as such shatter rather than splatter. Also presumably the diets for astronauts are regulated to prevent getting a splattery run. Can you imagine the chaos of an accidental shart in zero G in an enclosed container.
"err Houston we have a problem, there has been an ... errr... biological attack."
Then imagine if Fox News got wind (pun intended) of a the fact that a Russian was the cause of it. It'll be a diplomatic incident the likes o
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Indeed they are. Fecal matter that breaks off clean from the astronaut's anus is an important design criteria in making the food.
It's also important for pet foods and I've read at least once that the people who work on NASA's astronaut food also consult for pet food companies. The design criteria are the same:
- Subject has to want to eat it
- Nutritious
- Easy to handle fecal matter
They might miss the MAG (Score:3)
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Beats shitting in your diaper. (Score:2)
Space Plumbers (Score:1)
Russian is only $500 per flush! (Score:2)
Russian is only $500 per flush!
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In Soviet Russia part of space station, toilet flushes you!
pressing scientific question (Score:2)
How does zero-G affect the number of upper-deckers that occur?
I haven't been able to find anything in the scientific literature.
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toilet paper (Score:2)
Coffee machine (Score:2)
When are they getting a new coffee machine? And granite countertops?
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Kitchen and bathroom renos. Great way to prep the ISS for resale. Wonder what the MLS listings would look like.
...to encourage crew cheek separation... (Score:2)
You know who to call... (Score:1)
Howard, you're going to Space again!
Good idea ... (Score:2)
The UWMS will remain on the space station for the rest of the orbiting laboratory's lifetime, ...
Good idea, wouldn't want it to go to waste. :-)
anecdotal story... (Score:2)
I remember reading the book ridding rockets by mike mullane where he mentioned during the 80's on the shuttle a crew member wanting to get a call back when they where over russia so that he could take a giant dump while flying over it....I'm not sure if that was the same trip where they brought up a human skull with electrodes in it pinhead style, encased in some see through epoxy. He said it it was some experiment to test radiation or gamma rays on the brain...but to all of them thought it looked like this
messes... (Score:2)