Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin may have been the first to set foot on the lunar surface when Apollo 11 landed there 50 years ago, July 20, 1969, but had to give up some land amenities to be able to land at alum. .
The NASA engineers were so busy finding a way to bring astronauts to the moon that they did not care about designing toilets for the Apollo missions of the '60s and' 70s. In fact, the first toilets would be installed on an American spacecraft only when the Space Shuttle would have had one in the 1980s. (There was technically a toilet on the Skylab space station in the 1970s, but it was an awful little dresser that looked like a hole in the wall and the astronauts had to dry their excrement in a special compartment.)
"Defecation and urination have been bothersome aspects of space travel since the beginning of manned spaceflight," NASA's official report on Apollo space missions reads.
During Apollo 11, as with all other Apollo missions, the astronauts had to fight with a stinky bag to relieve themselves. This is what the process involved.
Human waste in space has been relegated to a bag system
To pee, the astronauts used what looked essentially like a condom (which they replaced every day), which was connected to a bag with a short hose. There was no female-friendly system because Apollo's astronauts were all men. Spills are frequent.
During Apollo missions, the astronauts stole an armband that was emptied into this bag. The armband has not been designed for women.NASA
The procedure to treat the poop in the space was not better.
"In the absence of a system providing positive means for eliminating fecal matter from the body, one had to rely on an extremely basic system for in-flight stool collection," says the NASA report. "The device used was a plastic bag that had been glued to the buttocks to capture the feces."
Read more: From poo to wrist to poop in a bag: a brief history of how astronauts have been going to the bathroom in space for 57 years
Astronaut Michael Collins, pilot of the Apollo 11 Command Module, during a break in his training to land the moon in July 1969 in Cape Kennedy, Florida, June 19, 1969. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin Jr. walked on the lunar surface. , while Collins turned alone in lunar orbit. AP Photo
This "faecal sac", which astronauts used, was delivered with a compartment for toilet paper. It had a built-in finger that allowed astronauts to stay clean while placing the bag on their buttocks. It was not easy to place the bag correctly inside the small flap at the back of the spacesuit of the astronauts. An Apollo astronaut estimated that the whole process of the bathroom took about 45 minutes to the astronauts.
And even then, the toilet bag was not infallible.
During the Apollo 10 mission in May 1969, astronaut Tom Stafford issued a warning: "Give me a quick towel, there is a dung floating in the air," he said, according to a transcript of NASA.
NASA has insisted that astronauts bring back all their feces for examination. So, once the Apollo astronauts completed their activities, they had to close their bags and "knead" them, as stated in the report, mixing them together to allow feces to safely return to Earth. (There is now a complete diary of the five Apollo 11 space swirls.)
The astronauts have "rolled the bags of shit in the smallest possible volume" and kept them for the return trip, according to the famous mantra of the backpacker "Pack it, pack it." Not surprisingly, the report notes that "the odor problem was continually present" during breaks in the Apollo bathrooms.
"In general, the Apollo waste management system was working satisfactorily from an engineering point of view, but from the point of view of crew acceptance, the system has to receive bad notes, "reads in the final report on the Apollo bathroom.
Because relieving oneself in space was such a painful, tedious, and smelly task, astronauts often took laxatives before launching and sometimes used drugs that slowed intestinal transit.
On the moon, astronauts wore diapers
The astronauts could not use this same system of bags to recover their garbage while wearing combinations on the lunar surface. So when the Apollo astronauts left their spaceship, they were carrying a "fecal containment system," which was essentially a layer.
It's not clear if Aldrin and Armstrong have already taken full advantage of these "systems" during their 21 hours and 36 minutes on the moon, but Buzz claims to be the first man to have pee on another celestial body .
"It's lonely like hell," he told the crowd gathered at the Newseum on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. "I pissed in my pants."
NASA
The plaque that Aldrin and Armstrong left on the Moon 50 years ago says "the men of the planet Earth laid the first foot on the moon in July 1969"
The plaque does not mention that they were both wearing diapers when they made that big leap.
