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Last week, the SpaceX Crew-2 capsule was supposed to complete its journey home, but one thing was blocked: its toilet. The toilet will remain offline for the duration of the journey while the vehicle is cleaned for return to Earth.
If the astronauts have to go, they will need to hold it or use astronaut-grade diapers embedded in their flight suits as an emergency.
“Of course it’s not optimal, but we’re ready to manage that when we’re on our way home in Dragon,” Crew-2 mission pilot K. Megan McArthur said at a news conference Friday.
The acorn-shaped capsule is slightly larger than an Earth minivan; It doesn’t have a proper bathroom. Instead, it has fans and a scuba toilet device built into one of the spacecraft’s compartments that create suction to keep waste going in the right direction in the weightlessness of space.
In September, SpaceX detected a leaky toilet in another of its capsules during the flight of Inspiration4, a three-day orbital journey of private astronauts who did not dock with the space station, according to company vice president Bill Gerstenmaier. Toilet problems at a press conference in October.
Mr Gerstenmaier said a pipe from the capsule’s toilet that drains waste into an internal tank had come loose and leaked fluids to a fan, which sent urine to an area under the capsule’s interior bottom.
When SpaceX engineers discovered the flaw, they instructed the astronauts on the space station to examine the Crew-2 capsules. They found similar traces of urine under the interior floor, which worried officials that the capsule could corrode some aluminum parts, posing a safety risk for the return flight.
SpaceX engineers conducted experiments on the ground to test whether urine mixed with an ammonia-removing compound called oxon could corrode aluminum. Mr Gerstenmaier said the pieces remained “for a long time” in a room that mimicked the humidity conditions on the space station.
From experiments and reviews of the Inspiration4 capsule, SpaceX found that the urine-oxone mixture had little effect on the aluminum parts, due to the heavy coats of paint that Crew Dragon was “a great blocking agent for liquid.” Crew Dragon’s mission management director told reporters at a press conference.
“We learned that the liquid evaporated in just a few days,” added Walker, “and that really limits the effect we observed while doing all of our post-flight inspections.”
NASA officials confirmed the results of the experiments and deemed it safe for Crew-2 to return to Earth. SpaceX has proposed a permanent fix for future Crew Dragon capsules that will ensure the urine tube does not unravel.
The toilet leak from the Crew-2 capsule continues, meaning astronauts in orbit, heeding nature’s call, must wear “underwear” in their flight suits, Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew program manager, told reporters on Oct.
“Our intention is not to use the system at all for the return leg because of what we’ve seen about the fluid,” said Mr. Stich. “The crew wear an undergarment on that suit whenever it’s available, and coming home is a short task, so it’s pretty typical to wear underwear and they can use that on the way home.”
Dr. “Space flight is fraught with many small challenges,” McArthur said. “This is just one of the things we will encounter and deal with in our mission.”
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