The noisy toilet on the Artemis 2 mission: Three breakdowns, frozen urine and a ‘mysterious smell’
The problems caused by the first bathroom with a door on a voyage to the Moon have turned it into an unexpected focus of the space journey
Just over an hour after Artemis 2 took off, NASA officials acknowledged a problem: the toilet wasn’t working properly.
This was the first time in history that a crewed mission to the Moon carried a toilet with a door. The Apollo astronauts of more than half a century ago, all men, relieved themselves in bags anywhere on the spacecraft, with no privacy. In 1968, during the first mission to orbit the Moon, Apollo 8, the commander became ill and didn’t know how to properly handle the bags. The three astronauts had to spend time dodging and catching clumps of feces and vomit floating in the weightlessness of space as they prepared to make history.
The Artemis 2 has a mixed crew: Commander Reid Wiseman, the pilot Victor Glover, the first African American to go to the Moon, Christina Koch, the first woman, and Canadian citizen Jeremy Hansen, the first person from outside the United States to make this space voyage. The new toilet system, costing around $23 million, according to Wired magazine, includes an air suction system that theoretically prevents leaks.
The first toilet malfunction was revealed on Wednesday during the post-launch press conference, attended by the agency’s head, billionaire and amateur astronaut Jared Isaacman. Mission officials explained they were working on the repair.
A few hours later, it was the specialist Koch who managed to solve the problem with help from mission control in Houston, Texas. “I’m proud to call myself the space plumber,” Koch said during the first live broadcast after the successful launch. The problem appeared to be a valve that may have become dislodged due to vibrations at the launch site, preventing the toilet’s flushing system from working.
Toilet plugs
The so-called Universal Waste Disposal System, NASA’s technical name for the toilet, is a compartment located right next to the Orion spacecraft’s entrance hatch. When astronauts enter during a spaceflight and close the hatch from the inside, they lose track of what’s up or down, as Koch herself explained in a video recorded by National Geographic before the launch. The compartment is equipped with handholds and footrests that help astronauts sit over the opening designed to collect feces or use a funnel to collect urine. This system allows for the recycling of urine for later use as drinking water on future long-duration missions. One of the main problems with the installation is that it’s so noisy that astronauts have to wear earplugs.
After the first incident, mission control had to tell the astronauts not to use the toilet. One of the nozzles that expels the astronauts’ urine was clogged, and there was a risk of the reservoir overflowing. The problem was that the urine had frozen in that nozzle. Mission control fixed the problem by rotating the Orion spacecraft and letting sunlight shine directly onto the pipe, which resolved this second issue.
The new bathroom has caused a third scare that has yet to be resolved. Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen detected a burning smell. When he opened the toilet door, the rest of the crew noticed it as well. The same smell had been present on the spacecraft on launch day. “To me, it was kind of a burning smell,” Hansen told mission control in Houston. “When I opened the toilet area, the rest of the crew could smell it almost immediately,” he added.
Before takeoff, the crew was warned that there might be a smell similar to when an electric heater is turned on. Initially, it was thought that the toilet’s plastic cover might be overheating.
NASA officials on the ground spoke at a press conference on Sunday about a “mysterious smell” whose source they had yet to identify. In any case, NASA technicians believe it does not affect the operation of the service, so it will theoretically remain in use until the source of the strange odor is identified.
The Orion spacecraft’s toilet even featured prominently in the first live conference call between the Artemis 2 crew and U.S. President Donald Trump and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, after they had re-established communication with Earth following a planned 40-minute interruption while flying over the far side of the Moon. The mission had achieved all its objectives. The four Artemis 2 crew members were the first humans to view entire sections of the far side. Furthermore, they had broken the record for distance from our planet, becoming the astronauts who have traveled the farthest in space. And even under these circumstances, the toilet came up. When one of the astronauts commented on the toilet’s operation during the mission, Isaacman replied, “We definitely have to fix some of the plumbing.”
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