Leaky SpaceX capsule toilet leaves astronauts in fix

Four SpaceX astronauts of the Crew Dragon capsule will be without the bathroom option, during their trip back home from Interntaional Space Station.

During the hours-long trip in the 13-foot-wide capsule, the crew will have to rely on "undergarments", said Steve Stich, NASA's Commercial Crew Program manager, on Friday.
NASA's Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide from Japan, will be the four astronauts who will be forced to travel without an operable toilet after issues were detected with it.

Also Read: SpaceX needs to fix the toilet before NASA astronauts launch

While the duration of the trip is not confirmed, it will be dependent on several factors, including weather.

"We are working to try to always minimize that time from undock to landing and so that's what we'll do with this flight," added Stich.

The toilet issue was first detected in September while SpaceX was inspecting a different capsule. It found that the tube used to carry the urine into the storage tank to be unglued, resulting in a leaky mess beneath the capsule' floor.

Also Read: NASA, SpaceX delay Crew-3 ISS mission due to bad weather

The toilet issue was found in all three SpaceX spacecraft. And as of now, only two spacecraft have returned from ISS with people onboard. While the first one took 19 hours to reach, the latter finished it in just 6 hours.

Recollecting the issue, Jared Isaacman, the commander and financier of the Inspiration4 mission, told CNN about the alarm going off during the mission alerting the crew to the problem with the toilet's fan. He said that his fellow passengers and him worked with SpaceX controllers on the ground to fix the problem.

Although no problems occured, the SpaceX crew dismantled the spacecraft, upon return, for further inspection and to figure out the underlying problems with the spacecraft.
"There's a storage tank where the the urine goes to be stored [and] there's a tube that came disconnected or came unglued," said William Gerstenmaier, a former associate administrator at NASA who now works as SpaceX's head of mission assurance.

Fans are used on spacecraft toilets for suction and to and control the flow of urine as microgravity in space can cause waste to go in every possible direction.

"That allowed urine essentially to not go into the storage tank, but essentially go into the fan system," he added. He also said that the Inspiration4 crew did not notice any sort of waste floating around the cabin as the leakage was still restricted to sealed-off areas undernearth the floor.

This scenario is a prime example of how, even after a spacecraft has conducted all the necessary tests, flaws can still emerge.

Also Read: NASA sending four astronauts to ISS on October 31

Gerstenmaier told CNN that SpaceX researchers ran a number of tests to make sure the capsule's aluminum structure had not become too corrosive and can hold up to the leaked urine. This is to ensure that the spacecraft is relatively safe to carry these astrunauts back. "For this, they coated some pieces of metal in urine mixed with Oxone. Oxone is the same substance used to remove ammonia from urine. These metal pieces were then put inside a chamber to mimc the vacuum of space and they found limited corrosion," he said.

While the astronauts are on the space station, they will not be facing issues, since the ISS has its own toilets. However, they will be forced to make use of the the undergarment option once they begin their return journey, which is scheduled to take place as early as this weekend, NASA said.

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