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NASA's Artemis II capsule is on its way to the moon. It's now far enough from Earth that when the crew looked out of their Orion spacecraft's window today, they saw the full blue sphere of the planet, the first humans to get that view in more than half a century. Some new and previously untested cargo is playing a key role in all of this exploration and discovery - a toilet. As Central Florida Public Media's Brendan Byrne reports, this cosmic commode is the first ever to make its way around the moon.
BRENDAN BYRNE, BYLINE: One of the first things the crew of four did when they got to space was turn on the toilet. And at first, there was a problem.
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AMIT KSHATRIYA: We had a controller issue with the toilet when they spun it up, so we got to work through that. That's going to take a - maybe a few hours to troubleshoot.
BYRNE: That's associate administrator Amit Kshatriya just hours after the launch from Kennedy Space Center. There was an issue with the pump on the toilet. There wasn't enough water in it to get it started, and it was a pretty quick fix.
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AMY DILL: Happy to report that toilet is go for use. We do recommend letting the system get up to operating speed before donating fluid and then let it run a little bit after donation.
CHRISTINA KOCH: We are cheers all around, and we will do that.
BYRNE: Crew members Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen are now free to move about the cabin and donate fluid, as they call it, to the onboard lavatory. That's thanks in part to the troubleshooting of their mission specialist, Christina Koch.
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KOCH: I'm the space plumber. I'm proud to call myself the space plumber. I like to say that it is probably the most important piece of equipment on board. So we were all breathing a sigh of relief when it turned out to be just fine.
BYRNE: That toilet is an important piece of equipment and a sophisticated one. NASA calls it the Universal Waste Management System. To use this lunar lavatory, you open a door in the floor and float into the stall. The toilet has two systems. One collects urine through a hose. Each astronaut has their own custom collection funnel. And solids are collected through a bucket-size cylinder. On Earth, toilets rely on gravity to move the waste down. Here, air suction pulls it away from the astronaut's body. Urine is dumped out into space each day, feces stowed below the toilet until they return home. There are filters to control the smell. The space toilet isn't a new concept in human space flight. In the 1970s, NASA developed the Skylab program, the agency's first space station. For those missions, says University of Central Florida historian Amy Foster, the agency designed the first space toilet.
AMY FOSTER: The idea was that these astronauts would be up for about a month for each mission, and the solutions that they had for urination and defecation going back to Apollo simply would not suffice. What they had during Apollo was pretty primitive, to say the least.
BYRNE: Especially when it came to what NASA refers to as...
FOSTER: Fecal collection, it was a collection bag that had kind of - at the opening, it had stickers that you just kind of, you know, stuck to your backside.
BYRNE: And they had to do that in front of their crewmates. The Artemis toilet is far more pleasant experience and a more private one, as mission specialist Jeremy Hansen explains in this video blog before his launch.
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JEREMY HANSEN: We're pretty fortunate as a crew to have a toilet with a door on this tiny spacecraft, the one place that we can go during the mission where we could actually feel like we're alone for a moment.
BYRNE: Artemis II is testing life support and other critical systems on the spacecraft, and that includes the toilet. Lori Glaze leads NASA's Artemis program and says all this troubleshooting will help future moon astronauts.
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LORI GLAZE: We've got real humans in there. They're trying to live and learn, and, you know, we're going to learn things along the way.
BYRNE: The crew will continue to learn things throughout their roughly 10-day lunar flyby mission. Next week, they'll travel farther than any humans have before, beating the Apollo 13 record of more than 248,000 miles from Earth, and they'll continue to use the toilet, boldly going where no astronaut has gone before. For NPR News, I'm Brendan Byrne in Orlando.
(SOUNDBITE OF FRANK SINATRA SONG, "FLY ME TO THE MOON") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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