GoKawiilThe traditional astronaut’s ‘low residue’ breakfast of steak and eggs pays tribute to the oldest and wisest strategy for going to the bathroom in space, which is to do everything possible to avoid it.
While capsules like Soyuz and the Crew Dragon are equipped with a rudimentary toilet kit, astronauts use a mix of drugs, diet, and occult knowledge passed down the generations to keep from having to use it. It can take more than two days for a Crew Dragon capsule to reach the space station, but the crew in the cramped spacecraft is expected to save the real fireworks for the relative comfort of the space station toilet.
The longest anyone has attempted to hold it in space is Frank Borman, on Gemini 7. Stuck in a two-man capsule the size of a phone booth, Borman was determined to get through his two-week mission without releasing the hounds. His crewmate Jim Lovell describes the outcome:
STONE: Can you give me some idea how you spent 14 days in that little, cramped quarters with somebody else without going absolutely mad?
LOVELL: It’s not easy. But you have to remember that you work so long—I was there 3 years—for a spaceflight, so I’d go up with just about anybody. And Frank and I were, you know, just this close together. And you get to know each other quite well.
STONE: Yes!
LOVELL: I mean it was something. As a matter of fact, Frank went, I think, 9 days without having to go to the bathroom. And he said, “Jim, this is it.”
LOVELL: “I said, “Frank, you only have 5 more days left to go here.”
Borman would go on to suffer miserably from spacesickness on Apollo 8, giving his fellow astronauts (including poor Lovell again) an unwitting but convincing demonstration of the inadequacies of the Apollo waste collection system, from both ends.
Everyone agrees that the sanitary conditions aboard Apollo were barbarous. Going to the Moon in the tiny capsule was like living in a three-man port-a-potty, made worse by the fact that doing the deed took the best part of an hour, with much of that time spent kneading antimicrobial powder through the contents of the collection bag.
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