The four astronauts on the Artemis II mission currently hurtling through space have had a largely quiet journey so far. Very few in-flight issues have cropped up that could disrupt their peace of mind.Except, that is, for the toilet.The Artemis II crew’s 16.5-foot-wide (5-meter-wide) Orion capsule has a waste management-related problem that arose in the early hours of Saturday as Day 3 was winding down.AdvertisementAdvertisement“It’s an issue with dumping the waste out of the toilet,” Artemis II Flight Director Judd Frieling told reporters Saturday morning. “And so it appears to me that we probably have some frozen urine in the vent line.”The astronauts — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — were still fast asleep by midmorning nearly 200,000 miles (nearly 320,000 kilometers) from Earth as mission controllers continued to troubleshoot the issue. And by 3:30 p.m. ET Saturday, early in Day 4 of the flight, mission controllers had a plan of attack: to warm up the frozen line by rotating the capsule to put the frozen urine into the sun. That unclogged the pipe, allowing the waste management system to expel the urine outside the capsule, potentially clearing the system to allow the astronauts to begin using the toilet again.Shortly after the attempt to expel some of the urine, mission control said the toilet was “go” — but “for fecal use only.”The process of venting the urine outside the capsule was a moment Koch also showed on camera earlier in the mission. The pee trickles by like glowing gems in the vacuum of space as it zooms by the Orion’s windows.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe crew also reported a burning smell coming from the bathroom, though mission controllers noted it was likely just the gasket material around the door.But it’s not the crew’s first run-in with toilet troubles.Shortly after launching to orbit from NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, the crew realized the toilet’s pump wasn’t working. Pumps are important and used for a variety of reasons, including assisting with pulling waste from the body. In space, there is no gravity to assist with such expulsions.That problem had a relatively straightforward fix: The crewmembers simply hadn’t put in enough water to prime the pump. After they topped that off, the system began functioning as intended.Advertiseme …
