![\"Orion](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/art002e004357orig-1000x750.jpg\")
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NASA<\/p>\n
The Orion spacecraft, as pictured by a camera mounted on one of its solar array wings during the Artemis II mission.<\/p>\n
The four astronauts from the Artemis II mission \u2014 who traveled around the moon and back on the first crewed lunar mission in half a century \u2014 reckoned with their place in history<\/a> during a news conference<\/a> Thursday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.<\/p>\n “Decades ago,” astronaut Christina Koch said<\/a>, “we made the decision that everyone who has a dream gets to work equally hard to achieve that dream. And that if we’re not going for all and by all, we aren’t answering humanity’s call to explore, which is what we do here.”<\/p>\n The next question was about their bathroom usage. Could the crew speak to their issues with the space toilet onboard the Orion spacecraft?<\/p>\n Sign up for the Hello, Houston!<\/a> daily newsletter to get local reports like this delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n Throughout the entirety of the Artemis II mission earlier this month, humans back on Earth were mesmerized by the quite literally out-of-this-world photos<\/a> taken of Earth, the lunar surface and the dark side of the moon during a solar eclipse. They were also fascinated by the issues astronauts faced with their space toilet.<\/p>\n NASA has called it the “space-age old question: how do astronauts go to the bathroom in space?” This new toilet was installed in the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis II mission, one of the most notable new pieces of equipment compared to the Apollo era. NASA is expected to diagnose the issues with the toilet and, potentially, resolve them for future missions.<\/p>\n RELATED: What comes after Artemis II? Here\u2019s what to know about Artemis III and NASA\u2019s lunar future<\/a><\/p>\n “I just want to say, 100 percent, point blank, that was a wonderful toilet,” commander Reid Wiseman said during Thursday’s press conference<\/a>. “The toilet worked great.”<\/p>\n NASA’s historic space toilet<\/p>\n In the Apollo era<\/a>, astronauts \u2014 notably, all of them men<\/a> \u2014 used a “urine collection device” underneath their clothes and a fecal bag, which was placed in a sanitation box in the spacecraft. Since then, space toilets have evolved over the years to the current iteration, called the Universal Waste Management System<\/a>, or UWMS.<\/p>\n NASA<\/p>\n A team member at Johnson Space Flight Center demonstrates lifting the urine hose out of its cradled position like a crew member would for use. A funnel (not shown) is attached to the open end of this hose and can then be easily replaced or removed for disinfection.<\/p>\n In zero gravity, space toilets utilize air flow to function. The crew uses a “specially shaped funnel and hose for urine and the seat for bowel movements,” which can be used simultaneously. The air flow begins as soon as the toilet lid is lifted, which NASA says helps with odor control. Foot restraints and handholds keep the astronauts from floating away.<\/p>\n NASA developed two UWMS toilets, which cost as much as $23 million<\/a>. One went on the Orion spacecraft for Artemis II. The other was put on the International Space Station in late 2020, though that toilet is used a bit differently. Since ISS missions are longer in duration, urine is pre-treated and recycled. As NASA’s Jessica Meir once put it<\/a>, “when it comes to our urine on ISS, today’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee!”<\/p>\n On the short-term Artemis II mission, the wastewater was vented overboard daily. Wiseman later called it “fun to watch that thing get dumped. … It’s just like a billion little, tiny flecks of ice floating out into deep space.” That process, though, was where some of the problems with the toilet began.<\/p>\n A number one priority<\/p>\n It was only a few hours into the mission that the toilet first began causing trouble.<\/p>\n “We had a controller issue with the toilet when they spun it up,” NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya said during a news conference on April 1,<\/a> the day of the launch. Later that evening, the four crew members and Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center became de facto plumbers and fixed the toilet.<\/p>\n The following day, a reporter asked NASA<\/a> in a press briefing about the troubleshooting process, asking, “On a priority scale, would you say this was a number one priority, or a number two?”<\/p>\n “We had always planned to wet the toilet with some water that we had pulled out of the PWD, the Potable Water Dispenser,” Judd Frieling, a NASA flight director, responded. “And it turns out, I guess, we didn’t put enough in. So, the pump was not fully wet. … Once we figured out that we didn’t put enough water in, we put more in, made sure that it was essentially primed, the pump was primed. And the toilet came right back up.”<\/p>\n Howard Hu, the Orion program manager, added that both the primary and secondary vent lines for the toilet were working at that point.<\/p>\n “I’m the space plumber,” Koch said during a press event onboard the spacecraft two days into the mission. “I’m proud to call myself the space plumber. I like to say it is probably the most important piece of equipment onboard. So, we were all breathing a sigh of relief when it turned out to be just fine.”<\/p>\n On April 4, though, the toilet began to raise some issues.<\/p>\n “During the night, we tried to vent the wastewater tank that’s attached to the toilet,” Frieling said that day<\/a>. “We had problems with that, due to a suspected blockage, we think probably due to ice.”<\/p>\n The crew was instructed at that point to use collapseable contingency urine devices. At one point, the Orion spacecraft turned to put the sun’s light on the wastewater vent to potentially heat it up and melt any ice. Frieling said that allowed about half of the urine to be vented out. NASA officials and journalists found themselves having to use potty-talk to discuss the important issue.<\/p>\n “The toilet technically will work with number one right now,” Frieling said. “Absolutely it’s still go for number two.”<\/p>\n Boldly going where no one has gone before<\/p>\n By the mission’s end, the Artemis II toilet had been mentioned in nearly every news conference NASA hosted across the 10-day mission. Aside from the early issues with the actual commode, NASA officials emphasized the toilet itself was operational.<\/p>\n “It’s kind of a complex engineering issue,” Rick Henfling, a NASA flight director, said during a news conference on April 5<\/a>. “When you expose a liquid to vacuum, there\u2019s a pretty chaotic environment. And there\u2019s a lot of theory and textbook work done when you assume it\u2019s pure water being exposed to vacuum, but when you introduce the variable of it being wastewater, there\u2019s other complex phenomena that we don\u2019t quite understand that are factoring into that vent line.”<\/p>\n In the coming days and weeks, NASA officials will conduct an evaluation of the Orion spacecraft, which will likely include the UWMS. Given the issues with the vent line \u2014 and the attention focused on it \u2014 it’s possible the toilet will be changed for future missions.<\/p>\n “This is a good opportunity to learn now on a shorter mission, and if changes are needed to be made to the spacecraft, we have opportunities before Artemis III to make those changes,” Henfling said.<\/p>\n No official word has come down on the fate of the space toilet. Future missions to the moon, and the eventual crewed missions to Mars, will last much longer than Artemis II. For those missions, crews will also have to recycle water at great lengths. Currently, at the ISS, about 90% of liquids are recycled. NASA wants to eventually increase that to 98%.<\/a><\/p>\n Even if the issues are resolved in future Artemis missions, the space toilet is likely to still be something to behold in the public eye.<\/p>\n “I think the fixation on the toilet is kind of human nature, right?” John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis II mission management team, said in an April 4 news conference. “Everybody knows how important that is to us on Earth.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA The Orion spacecraft, as pictured by a camera mounted on one of its solar array wings during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":254722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[58631,62457,59015,56,58,57,30077,66,1911,223,3951,96083],"class_list":{"0":"post-254721","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-artemis-ii","9":"tag-artemis-program","10":"tag-astronauts","11":"tag-houston","12":"tag-houston-headlines","13":"tag-houston-news","14":"tag-johnson-space-center","15":"tag-local","16":"tag-nasa","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-space","19":"tag-space-toilet"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Artemis](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Screenshot-2026-04-17-142642-1000x740.jpg\")
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