Shuttle Waste Containment Controls
Let’s face it. We all have to do it. “Using the restroom” is one euphemism “using the crapper” another one Then there is the loo, WC and in medieval times, the privy. And out of the mouths of any 5th grader when meeting an astronaut is the question “how do you go to the bathroom in space?” One astronaut’s response was “there a’int no graceful way.”
If you’ve seen 2001-A Space Odyssey, the only moment of levity is when Dr. Heywood Floyd is readying the instructions to use the zero-gravity toilet. (Those were real instructions, someone had to actually design a system that was less primitive than baggies, then write up the instructions).
Over the decades there have been countless variations of the process, but ultimately comes to using tubes, funnels, air circulation, hold down straps, bags and gloves. In fact it was such an awkward process, one Apollo astronaut went so far as to ask for a “low residue diet,” or foods that can almost entirely be used by the body leaving little waste. No more gloves and baggies for him. And to make matters worse, an astronauts, uh, “output,” was then saved and examined when they got back.
Perhaps the only thing worse to using a toilet in space is testing one on earth, where getting the test subjects and having then to work on they’re business rapid enough for the 45 seconds or so they’d get of zero-G in the training aircraft.
In the days of the Soviet MIR station, their toilet was nicknamed “the daisy” as it apparently smelled exactly not like a daisy, or any other flowers except perhaps the Amorphophallus titanum.
What you see here is the control panel for a real zero-gravity toilet located in the “WCCA”, the Waste Compartment Control Assembly,” and it looks so pretty with the brushed metal finish I had to include it.
I display this in my guest bathroom along with a flown-in-space “privacy curtain.”
