Hours into the most ambitious crewed American spaceflight in more than 50 years, the four astronauts aboard NASA's Artemis II mission encountered a very earthly problem: a broken toilet.
The controller malfunction meant that while astronauts could still use the toilet for solid waste, they could not use it for urine — a significant problem in zero gravity, where fans provide the airflow that pulls waste into the toilet and keeps it from drifting through the cabin. At least one crew member used a Collapsible Contingency Urinal, or CCU, as a backup while engineers worked on restoring the system.
The good news: the crew fixed it. Working closely with mission control in Houston, the crew was able to restore the Orion spacecraft's toilet to normal operations. Just before settling in for sleep, Koch checked in with Houston to confirm the toilet was safe to use through the night — and mission control's reassuring response was: "You are good to use the toilet all night."
The toilet itself — officially called the Universal Waste Management System, or UWMS — is a milestone in spaceflight history. It represents more than a decade of engineering work by Collins Aerospace, offering handles for stability in microgravity, simultaneous urine and feces handling, collection devices compatible with both male and female anatomy, and a privacy door — all in a system that is 61% smaller than the toilet used on shuttle missions. It is also the first functional toilet to travel beyond low Earth orbit.
Apollo astronauts had no such luxury — they relied on plastic bags and improvised containment gear for the duration of their lunar missions.
Artemis II is a 10-day mission that will carry its crew on a free-return trajectory around the moon before splashing down back on Earth, laying the groundwork for future lunar landings.
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Shortly after launch, the Artemis II crew reported a blinking fault light on Orion's toilet
