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[The bathroom chat—including more info on the UWMS—starts at 2:55.]
Space toilets use a fan suction system to suck up feces and store or recycle them. These toilets don’t seem like a particularly relaxing place to sit, but according to NASA, the pointy shape of the seat provides “ideal body contact” to capture all the poop.
Space toilets have used different entrances for number one (a funnel and hose, where the funnel can be removed for sanitization) and number two (the big hole) for decades, but the UWMS took feedback from astronauts to find out how. make this cumbersome process a little more comfortable. Melissa McKinley, NASA project manager for UWMS, explained to The edge:
“The funnel design was completely reworked to better fit the female anatomy, and in particular, this is a concern when crew members attempt dual operations, defecating and urinating at the same time.”
The shape, length, and position of the urine funnel itself were guided by input from the astronauts. Women in particular also found it difficult to sit and take care of both bodily functions at the same time, so the new UWMS has a revised seating design for precisely that reason.
There are also new footrests and handholds with the UWMS to prevent astronauts from floating away from the task at hand. Previously, thigh straps were used to hold them in place, which was annoying for everyone to wear, NASA explained.
For the first time, the UWMS also starts airflow the moment the lid is lifted, eliminating a source of potential floats when someone forgets. They have also designed it to be more resistant to corrosion and durable to minimize time spent piping. Metals like Inconel, Elgiloy, and titanium were 3D-printed in parts specifically for their ability to withstand the highly acidic solution used to pretreat urine so that it doesn’t leave solid deposits in the system, it reports. The edge. The toilet fan is the largest of these parts, as it was 3D printed from titanium.
It is also designed to be more energy efficient, which is a huge advantage in an insulated space tube with limited resources.
“You can imagine optimizing them can help in so many ways because space and energy are a luxury on a spacecraft,” McKinley explained to The edge.
Bringing the new toilet into space is also easier than ever, as it is 65% smaller and 40% lighter than the model currently on the ISS. Space is always at a premium for resupply missions like the one that took the toilet into space tonight, so every time I ask if I can send Fluffy Bunny into space, the answer usually involves vacuum packing. (The stuffed dinosaur from the Space-X Dragon had it easy, man.)
Even the way the UWMS handles urine and poop adapts to different situations. On board the ISS, you will send pretreated urine to a system that recycles the water for use on board.
“We recycle about 90% of all water-based fluids on the space station, including urine and sweat,” explained NASA astronaut Jessica Meir in the UWMS announcement. “What we are trying to do on board the space station is to mimic elements of the Earth’s natural water cycle to recover water from the air. And when it comes to our urine in ISS, today’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee! “
Think less Bear Grylls and more of what comes out of your tap at home. The UWMS is supposed to be better integrated with these urine recycling components aboard the Space Station, allowing it to recycle more urine for later use. Being able to recycle more water from urine also reduces the amount of water that must be sent from Earth.
For shorter missions like Artemis II, UWMS will work with a system that simply stores raw urine for later disposal. (I just hope the storage containers are spherical in shape so …reasons.)
The astronauts put wipes, gloves, and toilet paper in airtight bags when they are done. The poop also goes into airtight stool storage bags, although NASA is studying how to extract and recycle the water from this in the future. By now, most of those poop bags are compacted into a removable fecal storage container. Most of these go to small cargo ships designed to burn upon re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, but some are returned to Earth for further study.
The UWMS was launched to the ISS tonight aboard a Northrop Grumman cargo launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. You can watch the resupply mission again here:
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