Secret to going to the loo in zero gravity

Former International Space Station commander Suni Williams has lifted the lid on how astronauts aboard go to the toilet in space.

Personnel aboard the ISS often spend months at a time in space, so effective facilities for using the smallest room in zero gravity are essential.

Captain Williams, who holds the record for the longest space flight by a woman at 195 days, revealed details of the ‘orbital outhouse’ in a video tour of the station.

Her tour of the £12.5million facilities showed that it is apparently all a case of docking and alignment when it comes to going to the toilet in space.

The toilet, she explains, unsurprisingly ‘serves for two functions’ – number one and number two – with different colour-coded receptacles to accept each.

Pointing out the number two loo, she says: ‘You see it’s pretty small and you have to have pretty good aim, and be ready to make sure things get let go in the right direction.’

Pinching her nose, she adds: ‘And it smells a little bit, so I’m closing it up.’ ‘Also there’s a selection of paper,’ she says, including a soft kind for U.S. astronauts and a coarser, rough variety preferred by Russian cosmonauts.

Captain Williams, a U.S. Navy test pilot pilot who has over seven missions spend a total of almost 322 days in space, says the crew are provided with gloves, nappies and disinfectant wipes, ‘in case things really get out of control’.

‘The number one stuff can get really all over the place if you don’t aim correctly,’ she warns.
Although, she adds, both toilets have a little bit of suction to keep things ‘going in the right direction’.

Of course, that’s assuming that all the high-tech components aboard the ISS keep working as designed.

In 2009 there was a crisis aboard the station when its main toilet broke down with a record 13 people aboard.

One of the pumps in the crew’s main bathroom flooded, which is connected to the station’s wastewater-recycling system.

Astronauts were forced to don goggles, gloves and masks for some impromptu plumbing. They ripped apart the compartment, working well into the evening but failed to solve the problem until spare parts were sent from Earth.