A very expensive bathroom problem
Just a few hours after Artemis II left Earth for the Moon, NASA ran into an awkward piece of spacecraft engineering: the brand-new toilet aboard Orion stopped working properly.
The capsule carries the Universal Waste Management System, a high-tech bathroom that cost about $30 million and was supposed to solve years of astronaut complaints about previous designs. Instead, Mission Specialist Christina Koch reported a blinking fault light shortly into the flight.
The culprit turned out to be the toilet’s urine collection fan, which was completely jammed.
Houston to the rescue
NASA said the crew could still use the toilet for solid waste, which is a relief in the narrowest possible sense. For liquid waste, though, the astronauts had to use backup contingency bags while engineers on the ground figured out how to get the system moving again.
Flight controllers in Houston walked Koch through a series of steps to reach the fan, clear the blockage, and restart the system. In effect, the team spent part of the mission acting as long-distance space plumbers, which is apparently where modern lunar exploration is sometimes headed.
The fix worked before the crew went to sleep, and Mission Control eventually gave the all-clear with a very specific instruction: “let the system get to operating speed before donating fluid.” NASA did not, to its credit, waste the moment by pretending that was a normal sentence.
Koch later said the toilet was probably the most important piece of hardware on board.
“I like to think that it is probably the most important piece of equipment onboard,” Koch said. “We were all breathing a sigh of relief when it turned out to be just fine. It was just an issue of needing to warm up… a priming issue. We did originally think that something could be fouling up the motor. Luckily, we are all systems go.”
So the $30 million toilet did not fail permanently, only temporarily, because it needed to warm up and prime correctly. In the grand tradition of spaceflight, even the smallest problem becomes a very large, very public one when you are hundreds of thousands of miles from the nearest hardware store.
