Former NASA astronaut explains how to poop in space and it's not easy
You may have many questions about space.
How many planets are in the universe? Do aliens really exist? And why is there no gravity in space?
But there’s one question you probably haven’t yet considered.
How do astronauts poop in space?
Advert
We know astronauts are brave, intelligent, and highly qualified - but they're not super-human.
They still have to poop and pee when they leave Earth, and according to former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino, pooping in space “requires a lot of training”.
NASA says, in the absence of gravity, space toilets use air flow to pull pee and poop away from the body and into the proper receptacles.
Since toilets on NASA spacecraft are not like ours down on Earth, Massimino explained that you will need practise when it comes to using them.
"You get rendezvous training and robotics training in space, and there would be potty training,” Massimino told The Daily Show guest host Kal Penn.
Massimino said astronauts in training would have to practice relieving themselves on a training toilet and sit on another toilet to "practice alignment”.
"Because the key for pooping in space is hitting a very small target. It's not a big flush toilet," Massimino said.
"It's a little opening. And you open this little window to it, and you look down. It's very small so you've got to be properly aligned."
"So to practise that, this is when the instructors would leave the training area, would lock the door, there was a camera inside of this...".
He went on: "Look nothing for you on aliens but I've got this, this is the truth. These are the real deep dark secrets at NASA, they want you to talk about UFOs because they don't want you to know about this stuff because this is real stuff."
He went on to say that with a camera looking up, and a short circuit TV there too, you "practise your alignment to make sure that you're right in the centre of where that opening is".
"And then the instructors, what they told us was memorise that body position... what I remember was I'm riding a chopper, and I replicated that in space."
Speaking on the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Elisca Hicks and Mike Berrill, who are Crew Systems Instructors, also revealed a few facts about toilet hygiene in space.
Berrill explained that toilets in orbit use "airflow as the gravity equivalent".
But of course, things don't always go to plan.
For example, Futurism reported there was an instance in 1969 during the space agency's Apollo 10 mission when a piece of poop ended up floating in midair inside the spacecraft.
But things have progressed since then.
Who knows what the future will hold for waste management in space, but the next time you have to go to the loo, be thankful that you’re doing it with gravity’s help.