Astronauts excited for alone time on space toilet ahead of Artemis II trip around the moon
NASA’s Artemis II mission is preparing for liftoff, with four astronauts set to launch April 1 on a 10-day journey around the moon. They will travel aboard the Orion space capsule, a camper-sized spacecraft equipped with a newly designed private space toilet.
Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen recently gave a video tour of the capsule and highlighted one feature the crew especially appreciates: the small onboard bathroom.
“We’re pretty fortunate as a crew to have a toilet with a door on this tiny spacecraft,” Hansen said.
He explained that the bathroom offers the crew a rare moment of privacy during the mission.
“It’s the one place we can go during the mission where we can actually feel like we’re alone for a moment,” he said.
The “hygiene bay” is tucked behind a hatch on the floor of the Orion capsule. Inside the phone-booth-sized compartment, astronauts will float into position to use the facilities. Urine is collected through a hose system, while solid waste is handled with a specially designed toilet seat connected to sealed bags.
“The feces gets sucked down into the bottom into a bag, and you close that off and compress it into the canister,” Hansen explained. The sealed canisters will remain on board and return to Earth with the crew for disposal after the mission.
Urine collected by the system will periodically be vented into space.
“You have a urine hose,” Hansen said. “It gets collected, and a few times a day, we vent that urine to space.”
The new system, designed by Lockheed Martin, represents a major upgrade compared with the equipment used by astronauts during the Apollo missions more than 50 years ago. At that time, crews relied on plastic fecal collection bags and external catheters connected to urine bags, often with very little privacy.
Artemis II’s crew includes NASA commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen. During the mission, the four astronauts will share about 330 cubic feet of habitable space—roughly comparable to the interior space of two minivans.
Speaking during a video briefing from quarantine on Sunday, the astronauts said the tight quarters are a small price to pay for advancing human exploration.
“Answering the question of whether we are alone starts at the moon,” Koch said. “It’s a stepping stone to Mars, where we might have the most likely likelihood of finding evidence of past life.”
Wiseman added that exploration has always been a core part of human progress.
“At the end of the day, it’s humanity’s call to go explore, to do these things, and then to share them with the world and to motivate.”
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