DROPPED

Waste management was a bit of an afterthought when the space age started. Waiting for his Redstone to launch on May 5, 1961, astronaut Al Shepard famously (or perhaps infamously) wet himself. The mission was slated to last just fifteen minutes, so mission planners reasoned he would certainly be able to hold it for a quarter of an hour. The problem NASA hadn’t foreseen was that Shepard was sealed in his Freedom 7 capsule for hours before the short flight. With no urine collection system on board and no way to get him out of the spacecraft without significantly delaying the launch, Shepard was forced to urinate in his suit. He lay in his waste until the suit's cooling system evaporated the liquid.

After Freedom 7, urine collection improved. The astronauts could use simple bags to store the waste and, being a liquid, it was easy to jettison from the side of the spacecraft. Fecal containment was another matter.

The Gemini missions were the first missions long enough that astronauts would need to defecate, in spite of low-residue diets designed to minimize bowel movements. The fecal containment system, properly called a defecation device, was a rudimentary solution to this need. It was a cylindrical bag about a foot long with a 1.5-inch opening on the end covered in an adhesive. The bag came with wipe and a material that would kill bacteria and neutralize odors when added to the waste. This was an important part of the system since there was no provision to jettison solid waste. The astronauts had to store their filled defecation devices on board the spacecraft for the duration of the flight. The stowing problem was actually the biggest challenge on Gemini 5.

But there were others. We don’t think about it on Earth, but gravity plays a part in defecation, namely in separating the waste from the one producing said waste. In space, everything is falling at the same rate giving the impression of floating, so waste that would fall away from the buttocks on Earth doesn’t separate from the buttocks in space. To circumvent this problem, NASA added a little extension in the defecation device to help the astronauts with the separation issue. The extra material gave them a clean way to manually flick waste away from their bums.

Adding to the indignity of the act, the physical act of defecating in a bag was difficult. On Gemini flights, the defecating astronaut couldn’t give his companion too much distance from the bowel movement; the spacecraft was about the size of the front seat of a small car. On Apollo missions, the astronaut needing to move his bowels would float his way into one corner while the other two men would move as far away as possible. He’d typically strip completely nude, removing rings and everything. Water was limited on board so washing fecal matter from clothing was impossible. Then he’d stick the adhesive opening to his naked buttocks and use the facilities. The whole exercise from stripping down to redressing could take more than an hour.

Text: Popular Science

Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke spent 71 hours on the moon in 1972. On a recent phone call, he confirmed that the crew left human waste behind. 

“We did,” he says. “We left urine that was collected in a tank ... and I believe we had a couple of bowel movements — but I’m not sure — those were in a trash bag. We had a couple of bags of trash we kicked out on the lunar surface.”

(You might be thinking, “Wait he was on the moon for nearly three days and he’s unsure if he pooped there?” As he told me, “Three days is not bad to have without a bowel movement.” Fair enough?)

Even so, he says, they threw out the garbage thinking everything would be sanitized by the solar radiation. “I’d be really really surprised if anything survived,” he says. Plus, taking it back with them wasn’t really an option.

“The moon missions were engineered very carefully, and weight was a very big issue,” says Andrew Schuerger, a University of Florida space life scientist who recently co-authored a paper on the viability of microbes surviving on the moon. “So it made sense if you’re picking up moon rocks, you’d also want to discard things that were not necessary to increase your margin of safety.” 

During the flight to the moon, the astronauts relied on “a plastic bag which was taped to the buttocks to capture feces,” according to NASA. It was a disgusting, cumbersome process.