Be a crew member ark (Now airing on Peacock) Stepping into their starship, they know they’ll never see Earth again. The journey to Proxima Centauri was always a one-way trip, even before something went horribly wrong along the way, meaning they were taking everything they might need with them.
Even in the real world, leaving the safety and comfort of Earth comes with its own set of challenges. There are the obvious things like making sure the crew has food to eat, water to drink, and air to breathe. But what goes in must come out. No one likes to talk about it, but everyone does, and figuring out what to do with it is critical to human space exploration. We’re talking about one of the most natural behaviors in one of the most unnatural environments; we’re talking about pooping in space.
Astronaut Mike Massimino reveals the truth about pooping in space
If you’ve spent any amount of time thinking about what it’s like for astronauts to live and work in space, you’ve probably wondered how they handle bathroom breaks. This feels like a cheesy question, the kind you wouldn’t ask at the dinner table, but a fair amount of thought went into ensuring that astronauts in orbit can reliably eliminate body waste.
It turns out that using the bathroom after launch is weirder than we thought, and requires learning to use it again. Astros Mike Massimino dropped the proverbial bomb while talking to Kal Penn on a recent episode of the show. daily show.
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Massimino said it was actually a very interesting process that required a lot of training, and he would have known. Massimino was selected for astronaut training in 1996 and flew the Columbia space shuttle on a Hubble Space Telescope maintenance mission in 2002. The mission’s crew upgraded the telescope with new power units, solar arrays and cameras. Massimino then flew on another Hubble mission aboard the Atlantis space shuttle in 2009. During that mission, Massimino became the first person to send a tweet from space.
He first became aware of the orbital foot problem early in his training. Massimino flew the T-38 to the moon twice with famous NASA astronaut John Young on Apollo 10 and Apollo 16, becoming the ninth person to walk on the moon. man, and was the commander of the first space shuttle mission, when he asked what it was like going to the moon. “I tell you, Mike, the best thing,” Young replied, is that you can finally receive the priesthood. Young went on to explain that spending several days in microgravity on the way to the moon was enough to disrupt his digestion. One-sixth of the moon’s gravity is enough to get everything moving in the right direction again.
During astronaut training, the schedule may include rendezvous training or robot training; it may also include toilet training, according to Massimino. When potty training, the Astros install a non-functional practice toilet designed to find the correct alignment.
The key to pooping in space is hitting a very small target. Massimino said it’s not a large toilet, it has a small opening so you have to align it correctly. When he relays the message, the drill instructor leaves the room and locks the door. Even at NASA, some concessions are made for personal privacy. The astronauts then turned on the CCTV linked to a camera in the toilet, giving them a bug-eye view of what was going on above. Most of us wouldn’t want to know that much about ourselves, but space travel is expensive.
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It’s true; these are NASA’s real dark secrets. Massimino laughed and said they want you to talk about UFOs because they don’t want you to know about them.When the camera looks up, you’ll see a brief [sic] Circuit TV, a small TV, and then you practice alignment to make sure you’re centered in the opening.
Then it’s just a matter of remembering your body position and replicating it perfectly once you’re actually in space. Look, we’d all like to see Earth floating peacefully in a serene black ocean of space, but we’re not sure we need to think that much about pooping. What if something goes wrong?
Watch the full first season of The Ark, streaming now on Peacock, and be grateful that the toilet is firmly attached to the ground.
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Image Source : www.syfy.com