Leaky SpaceX toilet problem will force astronauts to use backup ‘undergarments’
Instead, the crew will have to rely on “undergarments,” Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, told reporters Friday night.
SpaceX first discovered an issue with its spacecraft’s toilet last month while inspecting a different Crew Dragon capsule. The company found that a tube used to funnel urine into a storage tank became unglued, and was causing a leaky mess hidden beneath the capsule’s floor. It’s a saga that, at this point, has affected all three spacecraft the company operates.
Timing will depend on a several factors, including how orbital dynamics and weather affect the return trip, but “we are working to try to always minimize that time from undock to landing and so that’s what we’ll do with this flight,” Stich added.
Jared Isaacman, the commander and financier of the Inspiration4 mission, as it was called, told CNN Business last month that an alarm went off during the mission, alerting the crew to a problem with the toilet’s fan. He said he and his fellow passengers had to work with SpaceX controllers on the ground to troubleshoot.
The issue did not cause any serious problems for the Inspiration4 crew, nor were there any instances of bodily fluids getting loose inside the capsule. But after the Inspiration4 crew’s returned to Earth, SpaceX disassembled its spacecraft to further inspect what might have gone wrong.
“There’s a storage tank where the the urine goes to be stored [and] there’s a tube that came disconnected or came unglued,” said William Gerstenmaier, a former associate administrator at NASA who now works as SpaceX’s head of mission assurance. “That allowed urine essentially to not go into the storage tank, but essentially go into the fan system.”
The situation highlights how spacecraft that have conducted all the necessary test flights, been vetted and approved, and even completed full missions can still prove to have design risks.
Fans are used on spacecraft toilets to create suction and control the flow of urine because, in the microgravity environment of space, waste can — and does — go in every possible direction.
In this particular case, the Inspiration4 crew did not notice any excreta floating around the cabin because the leakage was still relegated to sealed-off areas underneath the floor, Gerstenmaier said.
SpaceX is working to clean up and fix the issue on the Inspiration4 spacecraft, which is named Resilience. A brand new Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Endurance, that is slated to take four more astronauts to the ISS on Wednesday, will have the fix built in.
But the group…
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