Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

STAFFORD: Oh—who did it?

YOUNG: Who did what?

CERNAN: What?

STAFFORD: Who did it? [laughter]

CERNAN: Where did that come from?

STAFFORD: Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air.

YOUNG: I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine.

CERNAN: I don’t think it’s one of mine.

STAFFORD: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away.

YOUNG: God almighty.

[And again eight minutes later, while discussing the timing of a waste-water dump.]

YOUNG: Did they say we could do it anytime?

CERNAN: They said on 135. They told us that—Here’s another goddam turd. What’s the matter with you guys? Here, give me a—

YOUNG/STAFFORD: [laughter]…

STAFFORD: It was just floating around?

CERNAN: Yes.

STAFFORD: [laughter] Mine was stickier than that.

YOUNG: Mine was too. It hit that bag—

CERNAN: [laughter] I don’t know whose that is. I can neither claim it nor disclaim it. [laughter]

YOUNG: What the hell is going on here?

Broyan showed me a circa-1970 photograph of a NASA employee demonstrating the Apollo fecal bag. The man is dressed in plaid trousers and a mustard-hued shirt with cufflinked sleeves. Like so many photographs from the 1970s, it has surely caused its subject lasting embarrassment. This one more so than most. The man is bending over, his rear protruding toward the camera. A fecal bag adheres to the seat of the trousers. The first two fingers of his right hand are inside the finger cot, poised like open scissors. The last finger is adorned with a wide silver pinkie ring. Though his face is hidden, there is, says Broyan, “speculation” as to his identity. Broyan included the photograph in the history section of the first draft of a recent engineering journal paper he wrote. His superiors asked him to take it out. The feeling was that it was “not the best view of NASA.”

Here is Broyan’s summary of the astronauts’ feedback on the Gemini-Apollo fecal bag system, as presented in that same paper. Clearly not all crew members embraced the scenario with the jollity of Young, Stafford, and Cernan.

The fecal bag system was marginally functional and was described as very “distasteful” by the crew. The bag was considered difficult to position. Defecation was difficult to perform without the crew soiling themselves, clothing, and the cabin. The bags provided no odor control in the small capsule and the odor was prominent. Due to the difficulty of use, up to 45 minutes per defecation was required by each crew member, [85] Because the astronauts’ time was rigidly scheduled and because bowel movements generally can’t be, crew members were forced into conversations like this one, in the Apollo 15 mission transcript, between Commander Dave Scott and Lunar Module Pilot James Irwin. SCOTT: Al, why don’t you and I switch off here when… IRWIN: I’d like to take a crap if I can work it in, Dave. SCOTT: Okay. IRWIN: Tell me when. causing fecal odors to be present for substantial portions of the crew’s day. Dislike of the fecal bags was so great that some crew continued to use… medication to minimize defecation during the mission.

The Gemini-Apollo urine bags were less odious, but not very much so. Especially when they burst, as Jim Lovell’s did during Gemini VII. Lovell, quoted in astronaut Gene Cernan’s memoir, described the mission as “like spending two weeks in a latrine.” Hamilton Sundstrand suit and toilet engineer Tom Chase neatly summed up the sentiment among engineers and NASA brass at the end of Apollo: “We have to do better.”

NASA’s first zero-gravity toilet was a hands-on load-and-remove-your-own-bag model designed to facilitate specimen collection [86] Astronaut specimens from the Skylab and Apollo eras are still around, in freezers on the top floor of a windowless high-security building at Houston’s Johnson Space Center—the one that houses NASA’s collection of (non-biological) moon rocks. “I am not sure what our inventory of excreta from Apollo is right now,” John Charles told me. “Forty years of freezing, with occasional thaws due to power outages during hurricanes, may have reduced them to mere vestiges of their former glory.” They were there as of 1996, because planetary geologist Ralph Harvey stumbled onto them when he got lost taking a group of VIPs on a tour. “Back then all the doors opened to the same code,” he recalls. “I opened this one door and it was almost like the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark . There were these rows of long, low freezers. They all had a little light on them that’s blinking, and a temperature readout, and a piece of tape with the astronaut’s name. I’m like, Shit, they stored the astronauts in here! and I quickly got the people out. I found out later that was where they stored the astronaut feces and urine.” Harvey can’t recall the room number. “You have to stumble onto it, that’s the only way you can find it. It’s like Narnia.” during the medical fact-gathering missions of Skylab. It was built into the wall. In the years that followed, to accommodate the psychological and vestibular needs of the crews, NASA engineers and designers began building rooms and labs with a more consistent Earth-gravity-based orientation: tables on “floors” and lighting on “ceilings.”

Space Shuttle toilets have always been mounted on the floor, but you would not call them normal. The original shuttle toilet bowl featured a set of 1,200 rpm Waring blender blades positioned a brief 6 inches below the sitter’s anatomy. The macerator would pulp the feces and tissue—meaning, if all went well, the paper, not the scrotal, variety—and fling it to the sides of a holding tank. “It was kind of pasted there like papier-mâché,” says Rethke. Problems developed when the material in the holding tank was exposed to the cold, dry vacuum of space. (Freeze-drying was a way to sterilize it.) Now it didn’t stick together as well. The papier had lost its mâché. When the next astronaut switched on the macerator, tiny bits of fecal wasp nest that lined the walls of the tank would break off and get batted around by the blades, turning to dust that escaped into the cabin of the spacecraft.

Here’s how bad it got, as reported in NASA Contractor Report 3943: “Reportedly, astronauts aboard the current STS mission (41-F) have resorted to use of Apollo-style adhesive bags. On previous missions, clouds of fecal dust generated by the zero-gravity toilet have caused some astronauts to stop eating in order that they reduce their needs to use the facility.” The same report elsewhere pointed out that fecal dust was not merely disgusting, but could result in “an unhealthy growth of E. coli bacteria in the mouth,” as used to happen on board submarines plagued by sewage vapor “blowback.”

The macerator has long since disappeared, but escapees still occasionally plague the crews. The culprit these days is a phenomenon you will read about in space agency waste collection papers and, one hopes, nowhere else: “fecal popcorning.” Broyan gamely elaborates: “Because everything else is frozen, the material that’s going in, depending on how hard the stool is, has a tendency to bounce off the walls. You’ve seen the old air-pop popcorn machines? There’s an air flow in there and it’s kind of circulating. That material’s just floating around in the air stream, and it tends to come back up the tube.” Howdy, doody.

Fecal popcorning is the reason Space Shuttle toilets were equipped with rearview mirrors. “We ask them to take a look back there as they shut that slider,” Broyan says, “in case there’s a piece that’s on its way up the tube.” Fecal popcorning is the gateway phenomenon to fecal decapitation. You do not want fecal decapitation taking place aboard your ship. If a crew member closes the sliding gate at the top of the toilet transport tube just as a popcorning piece is crowning, the slider gate may decapitate it on its way shut. This is a heinous scenario for two reasons. Any material smeared on the top side of the slider is sharing the cabin along with the crew, and, quoting Broyan, “they’re going to smell it.” Also, the smearage on the underside will freeze-dry the slider gate shut. Now the toilet’s out of order, and everyone has to use the shuttle’s contingency fecal waste collection system: the Apollo bag. If you’re the boob responsible, you are in for some blowback from your crewmates.