For astronauts heading around the moon, one upgrade is unusually down to Earth. NASA’s Artemis II crew will have a toilet with a door, a system that can take urine and feces at the same time, and hardware designed for both male and female astronauts.
That is a long way from Apollo.
When astronauts first flew to the moon, they did so without a toilet. The Apollo program relied on plastic bags and funnels, a setup that crew members later described in a NASA report as “objectionable” and “distasteful.” More than half a century after those lunar flights and their toilet troubles, the four astronauts on Artemis II are set to fly with NASA’s Universal Waste Management System, or UWMS.
The system was built to fix long-running problems astronauts have faced in space and to make the experience feel a bit closer to a bathroom on Earth. NASA says the Artemis II version includes handles to help astronauts stay steady in microgravity, a system that can process urine and feces simultaneously, urine-collection devices for both male and female astronauts, and a door that offers some privacy inside the small Orion crew capsule.
The design has been in development for more than a decade. Collins Aerospace entered a contract with NASA in 2015 to develop the project. Since then, scientists working on the system have tackled problems seen in earlier space toilets while also aiming for a design that could be adapted for future moon and Mars missions.
“I think of waste management as an evolution of design,” says Melissa McKinley, project manager and principal investigator for NASA’s UWMS team. “The toilet has built on designs from Apollo, the space shuttle and even the International Space Station…. There is so much learning that goes into it.”
Apollo’s setup was rough. Inside the cramped crew capsules, astronauts had to strap adhesive-rimmed plastic bags and tubes to themselves to defecate or urinate. In weightless conditions, even attaching the bags was difficult. After using them, astronauts had to manually mix in a packet of germicide to stop bacteria and gases from building up inside the sealed bag.
The system also leaked.
During Apollo 10, astronauts spotted “a turd floating through the air.” During Apollo 8, the crew had to chase blobs of vomit and feces that had escaped into the cabin. A NASA report released after the Apollo missions said waste disposal “must be given poor marks” for crew satisfaction.
Astronaut Ken Mattingly was blunt about it during Apollo 16.
“I used to want to be the first man to Mars,” he said after describing the system. “This has convinced me that, if we got to go on Apollo, I ain’t interested.”
Those reviews pushed NASA to come up with something better. David Munns, a science and technology historian at the City University of New York, said the stakes are high because “the toilet is a ‘mission-critical’ system, so if it breaks down, the whole mission is in jeopardy.”
Before the space shuttle program, NASA engineers developed a toilet that could operate in low gravity. It looked more like a standard toilet on Earth, but astronauts still had to strap themselves in and use a vacuum hose so waste would not float back into the spacecraft.
That vacuum-based approach carried over into the space shuttle and the International Space Station. The two systems worked in similar ways, but there was one major difference. The ISS system recycled some wastewater, while the shuttle version vented it into space.
They were a big step up from Apollo’s bags and funnels, but they still had limits. They were not built with female anatomy in mind. They could not process urine and feces at the same time. And while they offered some privacy with a curtain, they did not have a solid door.
NASA’s UWMS was built as the latest answer to those problems. It is 3D-printed from titanium, and NASA says its lightweight, standardized design makes it easier to fit into different spacecraft. That includes the ISS, Orion for the Artemis missions, and future vehicles that have not yet been built.
The first version of the UWMS was tested on the ISS in 2020, and final installation was completed in 2021. That version included separate urine and feces systems that could be used simultaneously, changes to make the equipment more unisex, and the bathroom door.
NASA later modified the design so it could work on a lunar mission, then installed a version in Orion for Artemis II, the first crewed launch of the Artemis program. Scientists on the UWMS project are now waiting to hear how the four astronauts rate it after the mission.
“I am very excited for the crew to use this,” McKinley says, according to Scientific American. “We’ll know so much more when this mission comes back…. It’s really going to drive [waste management] on future Artemis missions and the lunar campaign, as well as the Mars campaign to come.”
