Moon. For much of human history, she has been a symbol of the divine feminine, the heavenly embodiment of emotion, intuition, and the natural rhythms of time. And since 1969, it has been stained with dozens of men’s stool bags.
Yes, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon’s surface in 1969, the crew left Neil Armstrong’s iconic footprint and also 96 bags of human waste. But no more. The moon deserves better. To this end, NASA launched the “Lunar Loo Challenge” last week, imploring citizens of Earth to design a toilet for use in its Artemis Program, whose lunar lander is slated to send the first woman and the next man to the moon by 2024. For the winners, there is a $ 35,000 prize pool to be divided among the three teams with the best designs, as decided by a panel of NASA engineers. The challenge also includes a youth competition where bathroom engineers under the age of 18 can submit their designs.
Previously, using the bathroom on board a spaceship was a complicated matter. The Apollo spacecraft crew had no toilets at all. When they had to leave, they urinated in rubber tubes and defecated in plastic bags with adhesive edges that were secured around their butts and then sealed.
“It was messy,” said Mike Interbartolo, project manager for the Loo Lunar Challenge who is working on the Human Lunar Landing System at NASA, Edge. “You had no odor control. The crew hated him. It was not easy to seal the bag well without your friend having to help. And that’s not the way we want to return to the Moon more than 50 years later. “
While space debris management technology has come a long way since then, designing a toilet that works at different levels of severity is difficult. NASA has designed toilets that work in zero gravity, like the ones aboard the International Space Station, but they want the next lunar lander to have toilets that work in both zero gravity and the Moon’s surface, which has one sixth of Earth’s gravity.
The winning toilet, according to NASA, must be compact, quiet, and energy efficient, and capable of accommodating a variety of human secretions, including menstrual blood, vomiting, and diarrhea.
NASA has yet to decide which spacecraft to use for the 2024 mission, and as Interbartolo acknowledges, “Going to shit on the Moon is not a priority, but we don’t want it to be a miserable experience for the crew.”
Nor, hopefully, will it be a miserable experience for the Moon, which has had to sit with a large pile of men’s poop on its face for more than 50 years. Please don’t let them disrespect you anymore
