Techlines Today

Houston, We Have a Problem and it Stinks

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 28, 2008 ⋅ Tags: nasa, stinky situations, toilets

Shit is about to hit the fan, literally.

Just days before the planned delivery of the international space station’s largest laboratory, its crew is facing a much more down-to-Earth problem: a stopped-up toilet.

[..]

Long a subject of bathroom humor, these high-tech commodes must use fan-driven air flow instead of gravity to transport human waste away from a crew member’s body and into a sanitary receptacle. Early spaceflights didn’t even have this method, but relied on bags with sticky openings — and an emergency supply of such bags is indeed aboard the space station.

The current round of trouble started last Wednesday in the Russian-built Zvezda service module, the station’s main living room, as noted in a NASA status report: “While using the toilet system in the Service Module, the crew heard a loud noise and the fan stopped working.  After some troubleshooting the crew reported that the air/water separator was not working.”

I find it interesting that the space race between US and Russia ended decades ago yet NASA and the media never waste a chance to point out Russia’s failed technology - the toilet in question here. When the Columbia space shuttle blew up it was never referenced as the “American built Columbia space shuttle.” Growing up, all any of us heard as how fantastic the Apollo program was - and it was, don’t get me wrong. No one ever heard about the Russian probe to Mars or their space stations. Actually, further proving my point, the only time we heard anything substantial about MIR was when the problems started happening - well after it’s projected usefulness.

Anyways, I hope the plumber doesn’t gauge them on this service call, I’d like to see people on Mars in my lifetime and all.

If you want to be notified the next time I write something please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading!

Related Posts

• Census Bureau needs grandpa’s abacus