SpaceX’s Dragon crew won’t be able to use the toilet

A leaking issue made toilet unusable

Because of a suspected pee leak in the toilet on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour, the four Crew-2 mission astronauts will not be able to use it once they leave the International Space Station. A similar issue happened on SpaceX’s all-civilian Inspiration4 flight in September. Therefore, in order to avoid leaks on future missions, SpaceX has rebuilt its toilet.

“Our intent is to not use the system at all for the return leg home because of what we’ve seen with the fluids we are talking about”, Steve Stitch, NASA’s Commercial Crew program manager, told in a prelaunch briefing for SpaceX’s Crew-3 astronaut launch. “We have other means to allow the crew to perform the functions they need”.

As a result, they’ll wear “undergarment” for waste management, which astronauts have used to relieve themselves while wearing spacesuits for launches, landings, or spacewalks for decades.

“Anytime the crew is suited they use an undergarment in that suit”, Steve Stitch said. “So, it’s pretty typical… and they can use that on the way home”. It’s a backup solution for any space mission.

During a Q&A session on the International Space Station in 2020, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken answers a question on how they pee during spacewalks.

The astronauts returning to Earth on the Crew-2 mission are NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Meghan McArthur, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency. They were scheduled to return to Earth today with a splashdown off the Florida coast, according to NASA officials, but the date has changed when SpaceX and NASA postponed the launch of Crew-2’s relief mission, Crew-3, due to inclement weather. As a result, after a handover with their incoming crewmates, the Crew-2 astronauts will return.

According to Stitch, SpaceX and NASA have worked to reduce the time it takes a Dragon crew to return to Earth after leaving the station.

When SpaceX’s first crewed flight Demo-2 returned to Earth in August 2020, it took over 19 hours to splash down after undocking from the station and SpaceX’s rescue team contacted the crew shortly after landing. The splashdown of SpaceX’s Crew-1 reduced that time under 6.5 hours. So within an hour of splashdown, SpaceX rescue workers hope to unload a crew from their capsule.

Source space.com