New ISS toilet provides ‘increased crew comfort and performance’
Here you can see a prototype of the new Universal Waste Management System with urine tanks.
NASA
Nobody can hear you blush in space. But that doesn’t mean that the International Space Station doesn’t deserve a toilet worthy of an astronaut’s piss break.
The International Space Station is getting a new toilet this year. NASA’s Universal Waste Management System (UWMS) is an upgrade to current space toilet technology that helps support mixed gender crews and is easier to use.
The toilet on the US side of the space station was designed in the 1990s. This means that the outdated toilet has some problems, including “sensitive to the orientation of the crew on the seat and can lead to accidental soiling of the collective fittings with feces,” according to a detailed review by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
The older toilet was also criticized for its unsuccessful “coverage and ease of use for simultaneous urination and bowel movements for mixed gender crews”.
The new toilet will solve these problems by redesigning the shape and volume of the seat. The new toilet system also has a lower mass than previous systems, is easier to use, provides more comfort and performance for the crew and treats urine so that it can be safely processed by spacecraft recycling systems, “a NASA report said Monday.
The new toilet will also adapt a feature that is already being used on one other toilet on the Russian side the space station. It will help astronauts to better anchor themselves in weightlessness by hooking their feet under toe bars instead of the thigh bars on the U.S. toilet.
The Russian toilet model has toe supports, so astronauts don’t have to worry about floating when using the bathroom.
NASA
While this new toilet doesn’t sound out of this world, NASA still has to tackle its larger goals of designing a waste system that offers greater storage options for longer missions to places like Mars.
One of these goals is to develop a waste system that “can stabilize and dry the metabolic waste to make it microbially inactive and potentially reuse the water,” said Jim Broyan, NASA’s deputy program manager for environmental control and life support technology.
This new universal waste management system will remain on the ISS until the end of the life of the space station. The delivery of the new toilet to the space station is scheduled for autumn.
