Four words you don’t want to hear in space...

[Mr. Coffee]

“The toilet is broken.”

The crew aboard the International Space Station is working on a problem with the system for collecting solid and liquid waste, which is a trickier proposition without gravity than it is on the Earth. Space toilets use jets of fan-propelled air to guide waste into the proper container.

A NASA status report noted that last week, while using the toilet system in the Russian-built service module, “the crew heard a loud noise and the fan stopped working.” The solid waste collector is functioning properly, but the system for collecting liquid waste was not.

The crew tried replacing one device, an air/water separator, and then a filter, but nothing seemed to bring the toilet back to full operation. Russian mission control told the crew — Russian Cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, and Garrett Reisman, a NASA astronaut, to use the toilet on the Soyuz capsule that is attached to the station as a lifeboat. But that system has very limited capacity, and so repairing the system has become an increasingly urgent issue.

As so often happens when there’s a plumbing problem, house guests are on the way: the space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch on Saturday, with seven astronauts aboard. The shuttle, however, has its own toilet.

Nicole Cloutier-Lemasters, a spokeswoman for NASA, said that mission managers are working on plans to carry replacement toilet parts to the station. In the mean time, she said a temporary work-around has been put in place: “they’re bypassing the troublesome hardware” for urine collection with a “special receptacle” that has been attached to the toilet, she said.

Of all the technological achievements of space travel, none has captured the popular imagination as much as bathroom physics. Mike Mullane, a former astronaut and professional speaker, said questions about the operations of space toilets are the most popular questions from audiences by “more than ten to one” over such questions as “have I seen any aliens” and “did we fake the moon landing.”

Mr. Mullane, who has written a ribald book, “Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut,” recalled that on a shuttle mission in 1984, mission managers shut down the urine collection system out of concerns that an icicle of frozen urine at the discharge port could damage the spacecraft’s delicate tiles during reentry. The crew, including astronaut Judith Resnick, had to urinate in plastic “Apollo bags” that are stored on board.

It was, he said, an annoyance, but “it’s one of those camping-trip kind of things you have to adjust to.” Set against the larger risks and grandeur of space travel, he said, “this is small potatoes.”

[FaxModem1]

Hope they can hold it till Sunday.

[FireNexus]

I'm sure they can just pee in bags for a while.

[Sarevok]

Space toilets use jets of fan-propelled air to guide waste into the proper container.

The shit has hit the fan ?

[The Yosemite Bear]

Huston we have a problem.

[Bounty]

The solid waste disposal is still working; they have the facilities aboard the Soyuz and in a week they can pop over to the Shuttle for a wee. This is inconvenient, but it doesn't look like a serious crisis.

I wonder why they don't have an Apollo-style toilet as a backup; that one didn't recycle the water from urine, but it didn't need power or complex parts either, it just vented everything into space.

[PeZook]

I wonder why they don't have an Apollo-style toilet as a backup; that one didn't recycle the water from urine, but it didn't need power or complex parts either, it just vented everything into space.

It may have something to do with the hazards inherent in spraying around millions of ice crystals in orbit

[Bounty]

I wonder why they don't have an Apollo-style toilet as a backup; that one didn't recycle the water from urine, but it didn't need power or complex parts either, it just vented everything into space.

It may have something to do with the hazards inherent in spraying around millions of ice crystals in orbit

I thought the station did vent other junk

[bilateralrope]

I wonder why they don't have an Apollo-style toilet as a backup; that one didn't recycle the water from urine, but it didn't need power or complex parts either, it just vented everything into space.

It may have something to do with the hazards inherent in spraying around millions of ice crystals in orbit

So aim them downwards.

[PeZook]

So aim them downwards.

This won't make them deorbit, just clear the station.

I thought the station did vent other junk Confused

They occasionally dump some junk, yeah - but it's big, stays in one place, is easy to track on radar and when it eventually deorbits, you know it. Dumping large quantities of ice overboard can create clouds of what are essentially large meteorites. Apollo didn't have to bother, since they did outboard vents when coasting to the moon and from it.

At least that's my theory why they try to minimize waste dumps overboard.

[Korvan]

I've heard that NASA is making fixing the space toilet their number one priority. They're also making it their number two priority.