They put on their space suits one leg at a time, they have to eat, sleep, and just like

us, poop. The only difference is if their toilet doesn't work, they can't pop into

the local coffee shop to relieve themselves. Oh, and their poop will float around their

heads in an extremely confined environment. All this means it's crucial that the toilets

we send beyond the surly bonds of Earth's gravity have the right stuff, and that's

why NASA is about to test out a new toilet that cost $23 million.

$23 million sounds like a lot for a toilet unless you are of course an insane billionaire

who wipes with priceless renaissance paintings. It's certainly a lot more than we spent

on waste management in the early days of space flight. Apollo astronauts didn't have the luxury

of anything so fancy. They just had to go into bags they taped to their all-American derrieres.

It wasn't until 1973 with the launch of

Skylab that a NASA spacecraft had a proper toilet. Actually “toilet” might be a bit

strong of a word. Really, it was a hole in the wall with some suction, and on the other

side of the hole? More bags to collect samples for analysis.

So you see it's pretty small, so you have to have pretty good aim.

The toilets installed in the ISS today are

more like regular toilets here on Earth, with the addition of a funnel to suck up any liquid

waste. Solid waste is still deposited in plastic bags that are bundled up with other trash

and shot back toward Earth to burn up in our atmosphere. But if the bags are filling up

before trash day, astronauts have to put on a rubber glove and pack it down themselves.

Moving on before I can think about that too much, the goal of this pricey privvy is actually

to save money. See, right now space toilets are custom made for each mission, but NASA's

goal with this new toilet is to make a universal waste management system; one that could be

installed in a variety of spacecraft. These future crewed exploration vehicles will have

much less space inside than the ISS, so a more compact design was needed. It was also

important to make something self-contained and easy to maintain, unlike the current ISS

toilets which are hard to access because they're behind a bulkhead.

The new toilet also helps preserve one of the most precious resources in space: water.

The fancy new space toilet has a urine pretreatment dose pump and pretreatment quality indicator

which allow for water to be recovered from urine. Yes, astronauts drink recycled urine.

Still think you have what it takes? Along with the practical considerations, NASA

also made some quality of life improvements, particularly for female astronauts. The seat

and urine funnel have been redesigned with them in mind. Still some things never change:

there's no special trick to vaporize poop into rocket fuel or anything like that just

yet. No, the solution for that is once again good old plastic bags, which will be sealed

up, stored in an airtight container, and you guessed it, sent back to someone on Earth.

So, you may be wondering where exactly $23 million went, and frankly I'm not totally

sure myself. But apparently it's par for the course. In 1993 the Space Shuttle's

new toilet cost an estimated $30 million dollars. So this new head is coming out ahead.

The first universal waste management system will be shipped to the ISS in September of

2020. Once installed, it will serve the dual purposes of increasing the size of the crew

the ISS can accommodate and testing the new toilet tech, presumably when the ISS has enchilada

night. After 3 years of collecting data and evaluating

feedback, the second new space loo will be installed on the Orion spacecraft, the craft

that will take humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars. When that day comes, astronauts

will boldly go where no human has gone before and go where no human has gone before.

Current space toilets only work in microgravity, so NASA has issued a challenge for designs

that will work in lunar gravity as well. The prize is $35,000.

Enter to win and you could be flush with cash.

If you like this video, check out this other one I did on the history

of space toilets, don't forget to subscribe and leave a comment, and I'll see you next

time on Seeker.