Kamal Ghorui
Apollo to Artemis, plumbing is space travel’s Achilles’ heel – there are 96 bags of human poop on Moon
Forget Mars. It’s not happening. You might make bulletproof rockets and cosmic wave shields, but where’s the toilet to last the trip? After 50 years of trying, the best we’ve got is the $30mn UWMS – Universal Waste Management System – that broke down as soon as Nasa’s Artemis II mission started, and has proven buggy on the way, too. The crew are lucky they’ve got “space plumber” Christina Koch with them on the 10-day mission. But Mars is at least a nine-month journey one way. You’d need a crew hired entirely from Kendrapara – India’s plumber nursery – to make it there, and back.
Then what? You could be on a plane that’s forced to turn back midway, due to choked toilets. Truly, when it comes to human flight, fate is faecal. One time, 11 of a plane’s 12 toilets were choked. International Space Station has only four. The most ironic plane tale is from Jan 2018, when a Norwegian flight to Munich U-turned after 20 minutes due to choked toilets. It had 85 plumbers on board. That same year, in a village near Gurgaon, a large and icy “meteorite”, weighing 10-12kg, fell. It turned out to be “blue ice” – frozen waste from a plane lavatory. Blue ice is not a joke. It smashed a woman’s shoulder in MP, in 2016, cracks a few roofs every year, and once knifed off a plane’s engine at 35,000ft.
All because we can’t stop plane loos from leaking. But it’s a lot worse on spacecraft. In declassified files from 1969’s Apollo 10 mission, astronauts are heard asking for napkins to catch faeces floating around the cabin. Nasa shuttle Discovery’s waste system failed on 10 of its first 11 missions and needed a $12mn fix. As late as 2021, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft had a malfunction. Still think Mars is doable? All the best, but we’re staying.
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