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are required to quote, need their fecal matter, need it like a pizza until it was thin enough to mix with a liquid bacterial killer to stabilize the leavings so then they can be taken back to Earth's surface and be studied and evaluated. Welcome back to Privy. Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded right here in my bathroom. I hope you all are doing well this week. It's been particularly warm up here in the Pacific Northwest.
Usually Oregon is rainy and blustery and I mean it's a little bit today but it was hot. There was a moment this week where you know it's 80 plus degrees and you're sitting there wondering like if this is April what is July and August going to have in store for my as a person who is not built for temperatures over 80 it got spooky for a second but here we are it's cooling off which I love and man it's getting busy kids are back in school it's it's been good
I know I've shared before about work at a high school and so it's just been nice to have kids back in person and yeah, get to actually work in that way. It's better by far. But yeah, if you don't know, like I said, this is a podcast about bathrooms. That's enough about me talking about what I got going on. also at the point of recording this, the new Pokemon Snap is out.
It's pretty wild because I haven't played it, but my lovely wife and children have and so I've gotten to watch them and so I'll get to play it eventually but you know I'm excited to see that it's fun to see there's a lot of like nostalgia burst with the old Pokemon Snap being rolling around and playing that on the N64 and now seeing this one and all the updates I'm excited by what I see so yeah Pokemon Snap watch also Pokemon Go is a mess uh But here we are. So that's the update.
That's the Pokemon watch. I give you that every now and then. But we're not here to talk about Pokemon. That's not what we're doing here. There's other podcasts for that. We are here to talk about bathrooms. as I've talked to and said many times, when we start to talk about and think about bathrooms, there's a lot that we take for granted.
bathrooms and this place where we get to go and we get to sit and if we have to poop we can poop easily there and in here in the US of A there's usually toilet paper at every bathroom. just it's just we have a lot to be thankful for but you know we have light at the flick of a switch.
I can pay for stuff on my phone the sun rises and sets each day like literal clockwork but one thing That we that we don't think about and we definitely take for granted much like bathrooms, but I think we take it even more for granted is gravity gravity is calculated to be a force of nine point eight one meters per second squared ah and so Newton sir Isaac Newton he was a sir because he was a sir his name was Isaac and His last name was Newton because he loved Fig Newton's he
got conked on the head by an apple traveling at that 9.81 meters per second squared force downward. And so today on privy, we are going to talk about the beauty of gravity as it relates to what we do in the bathroom. We don't always think about gravity. It's here. It's underneath us. Maybe that's not right. It's pulling us down. It's keeping us here. But As we are going to discuss, gravity plays a particularly important role in bathroom-ing.
And you might hear that and you might go, there's no way that he's going to talk about gravity this whole time. I promise I'm not. But it is important. Gravity is crucial. Not just to making sure that you don't float off into the sky like some Macy's Day parade balloon, Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade balloon. Macy's Day isn't real. But it literally keeps you on this earth. I don't even explain this. It's gravity. Also, yesterday was apparently Star Wars Day.
Now, on the list of completely fake and made up holidays, Star Wars Day, May the 4th, has to be pretty high on that list. Like, this is fake. If you enjoy Star Wars, that is wonderful. I'm not trying to harsh your yum. I don't get it. I haven't seen all the Star Wars movies. ah I don't, I probably will, who knows. I got mixed reviews of people telling me I should and should not.
But one thing that Star Wars, to my knowledge, as a person who has passively interacted with it, never really covers is what is it like to go to the bathroom in space? Like you got Luke Skywalker and he's running around in the stars. It never really shows him doing any bathroom stuff, like to my knowledge. I might be wrong. What is it like to go to the bathroom in space? In space, in case, let me key in here, there is no gravity. And no gravity changes things.
It changes the dynamic that we're going to be playing with when we're talking about bathrooming. So, this week on Privy, we're going where probably plenty of podcasts have gone before. And we're gonna talk about space. And we're gonna specifically talk about bathrooms and doing bathroom in space. Humans, that's us, if you're hearing this, there's a pretty good chance that you are a human grounded on planet Earth have the assistance of gravity to help pull their deposits away from their body.
Now, you might not think about this, but next time that you are dropping a two, just Think about that moment between when it leaves connection to your frame and that plop. That is all thanks to gravity. Yay, gravity is good. And so we as humans, we have the assistance of gravity as it helps pull our fluids and our solids away from us. It's a good thing. But... If you are not on earth, if you're a spaceman like Luke Skywalker, you are, you're gonna have some difficulties.
So you're gonna have to reckon with some things. And what's wild is in looking at, so I'm here in America, the United States of America. So I will be referencing NASA primarily because yeah, more on that in a bit. But when we start looking at what NASA has done and how NASA has handled going to the bathroom. At first, this is the wild part. Like, all of the scientists and all of the people who are doing planning stuff for NASA, presumably they all go to the bathroom.
Yet, at the beginning of this whole endeavor, it doesn't really seem to have been considered. It was kind of like, well, you know, that is a good point. What if somebody has to go to the bathroom? Guess we'll see. Something you do every day. Almost it seems as you look at how NASA handles and has handled pooping and peeing in space almost seems like an afterthought.
It seems like they went hmm You know that would have been good to plan for but we're gonna roll with it Alan Shepard ah was an American spaceman who helped pilot the Mercury 7 into space and He is reported to have never even made it off the launch pad before he had bathroom concerns. Mr. Shepard and his fellow astronauts are sitting on the launch pad in the rocket and Shepard calls out and he says, y'all, I gotta pee. And NASA's like, yeah, I bet you do.
And I imagine there's this moment where it's like, so what are y'all gonna do about it? Like, I'm in a rocket getting ready to shoot into the atmosphere and my base human need of peeing is maybe a barrier. And so NASA's go-to, this is their solution. Just go. Just pee your pants. And NASA's, yeah, just go pee. So Mr. Shepherd, not of his own like willingness, like there should have been a plan. That's all I'm gonna say. But he pees himself in his space suit, in his seat.
in this rocket and it's reported to have completely dried before they actually launched. They're sitting there so long waiting for this thing to shoot into space that he has enough time to not only pee but sit in the pee and have it be dry by the time the actual launch happened. That's bananas. That's too long. Like if you work out and you got a sweaty shirt, that thing's still wet by the end of the day. So, we're talking hours and hours here.
But on its first run, NASA's answer to pee not even in space, still on planet Earth, NASA's solution is just pee your pants. Like, it's okay. And we won't tell anybody except for they did because it's on the internet. So in the following year NASA designed a device for you to pee. Cool. Okay. Now we're making technology to help us go. And it allowed a collection of the pee to be taken. You would pee and it would collect it in this thing.
And by the time NASA shot John Glenn aboard the Mercury Atlas 6 into orbit in 1962 that had passed out the device. NASA has created this device. For posterity's sake, I am going to try to best describe this device on an audio medium, and there will be a picture on the privycast socials and stuff for you to reference later. It is a long rubber bag that looks distinctly like a male condom. And this is applied to the the genitalia of male astronauts.
And this rubber would have served as a not great solution. It's a poor contraception because it is designed with a hole in the end that then is rigged up to a collection bag or more likely to a tube which ran to the collection bag. What you got is like a big long water balloon that they would hook to themselves and the solution is just P and then it would go through the tube and into this collection bag. Here's the deal. Tubes, tubes, tubes need one or two things to move liquid through them.
Tube science. One is gravity. Now, as we've already discussed, if you're orbiting the sweet little planet Earth, you don't have a lot of gravity to work with. So this means that you need to run to option two, which is of course pressure or force, to push the whee through the tube and into the bag. So with no gravity, you're needing to apply force. And that force is produced by your own pee power, an ability to push urine out of your... PP hole, faster than slower.
But as you're trying to apply enough force to get the pee to move smoothly and well through the tube and into the bag, if you applied too much, the bag would leak. It would do the whole like, and it would like pull away and now you have a brand new problem that nobody wants to deal with. You spill and you're right back to where Mr. Shepherd was a year prior. or multiple years prior. Pee in your spacesuit. Not ideal. I'm not an astronaut. I never will be an astronaut. I'm not going to space.
Sorry, Leon Musk. I'm not going to space. But I imagine if I did, the last thing that I'm gonna want to have to interact with is pee inside of my spaceman suit. Also, why do the people on Star Wars not wear spaceman suits? Anyway, I digress. Happy May 4th, everyone. And so far, We've talked about pee. I will acknowledge that. What about poop? Because you're hearing this and you go, well, I mean, like, I could probably like just go into a Mountain Dew bottle or something if I was in space.
And I will also note here in a little bit, but like this is all being designed for men. There is no conversation about a woman going to space at this point. It's not on the table. But they start to... make plans for, well what do we do about poop? Like, it's different. And I will also note that up until now, these flights and these tests that NASA's been doing, they haven't been that long of time in space. Like, a day, maybe a couple days. So, it's, you know, you could get by.
But Project Gemini was a NASA space program to test crude orbital flight, which means they're testing to see if they can send a piece of machinery into outer space that would orbit the earth and have a crew of human astronauts on board. Crewed space orbital flight. Gemini is a stepping stone to getting to the moon and a number of these flights were manned and they had to test if people could be in space longer than eight days.
They had to show this using science because they're NASA that you could do it in order to then be able to say, I think we can make it to the moon. But if you're out in space for eight days, you're gonna have to poop. You are gonna have to poop. 100 % guaranteed, like you can't get around that. They have now designed a separate device, and this is probably towards the tail end of the 1960s, for making brown. And what this is is a bag that you would tape to your butt.
So you have a bag, you tape the bag to your backside, and it's essentially a diaper that doesn't close on the front with a collection bag behind it. Now, come with me on this journey. When I was growing up, I had this doggy poop pooper scooper. And it was one of these where you could like loop the bag around this like long stick. And what it would do is you could just slide the wand around and all of the poop would go directly in the bag. So you didn't have to like, there was no like transfer.
That is the system that I imagine is happening except for instead of a, circular cylinder thing on the end of a long stick, it's just the human butt and the poop is just going straight into the bag. It's a diaper with a sack on the backside of it. But to use this, again, you essentially have pressure to push it in the bag because gravity ain't gonna be doing it for you. And sometimes the tape would come off. You would go to like, um and.
The tape would separate from the human body and if you've ever tried to tape anything to yourself, I hope it was like that medical tape, but then that stuff is like a bear to get off. And so like, if it comes off, that poopie's gonna be floating around. And there's a report at one point of a spaceman having a diaper malfunction. That's not the worst of it. Once the leavings were in the bag, so people have renown.
are required to quote, need their fecal matter, need it like a pizza until it was thin enough to mix with a liquid bacterial killer to stabilize the leavings so then they can be taken back to Earth's surface and be studied and evaluated. So here's the deal. You know, you've got spaceman lasagna, you eat it for dinner the night before. The next day, you use the butt contraption and you poop into the thing.
Now, you have the astute pleasure of taking your bag and like playing with it to make it thinner. No. Just no. All in the name of science. But as you can guess, they didn't like essentially playing with their poop until it can be stabilized. I mean, it makes sense. If you're gonna research it, But like, you're needing poop. Needing like K-N-E-A-D-I-N-G. Like, needing pizza. But like, it's poo in a bag.
This is science maybe, you know, I Jurassic Park, they spend all their time asking if they could, not enough time if they should, you know what saying? But before the end of the decade, NASA and the Apollo missions, ah they hadn't done enough R &D on these diapers because On these Apollo missions, astronaut Tom Stafford is reported as calling in, Houston, there's a turd floating around our craft. Somebody pass a man napkin, he needs to get that cleaned up.
Houston, there's a turd floating around our craft. I can't imagine a worse call. In fact, the Apollo mission used what I'm calling a super diaper, a big absorbent, big pad, big splash diaper. It could hold it all. Any and all leaving get caught in the special Apollo diaper. It's a super diaper, a space diaper if you will. When NASA built Skylab in 1973, they finally put in a toilet. We made it. Toilet installed.
So far, scientists capable of shooting humans into space have designed a glorifying strap-on catheter, a strap-on ziplock bag, and a sham-wow level diaper to help with bathroom in space. That's what we have dealt with so far. Things are messy. They didn't work well. There were leaks and squeaks and overflows, all three of which are the least likely, the least desired thing you want when you are bathrooming ever in any situation, especially in zero gravity.
But to NASA's credit, they weren't sending people up for super long. But like Gru and Despicable Me, sites are set on the moon. They built Skylab in the 1970s, and with it, astronauts were going to be going to space for extended periods of time. As any parent of toddlers and children will tell you, diapers, super diapers even, space diapers, if you will, are not a soil collection model that's designed to continue indefinitely. It has an end date.
And so you can't just say, build a bigger diaper, because eventually you're gonna have an absorbency problem. The longest Skylab mission in the 1970s was 84 days long, and you gotta come up with a better solution for 84 days. So they built a toilet. Our good old friend the toilet. The Skylab toilet was essentially a whole fashioned in the wall of the waste management section of Skylab. This wasn't just any hole.
Without the aid of gravity, merely relying on human and musculatory and like all of those anal muscles, that's not gonna cut it. You're not gonna be able to like push this through the hole. I know what we do. Let's strap a vacuum to the space dookie hole. Once the poop had made it into the hole, the vacuum sucks the poop through and it's dried with heat.
Think like making diaper jerky and then you take the diaper jerky and you dump it in a waste tank and then it's taken back and studied for science. No more needing. We're not playing with it anymore. So as awful as space diaper jerky sounds, it's better than putting it in a bag and like rolling it out and trying to get it thin with your fingers. That ain't right. They didn't get poop on their fingers. It's inside the bag. Yeah, I don't know what the equivalent is. There ain't no equivalent.
uh I wonder if the astronauts were told the bathroom system before they shot this guy. I hope when they went out recruiting people and they're like, hey, we want to make you an astro traveler. I hope they were upfront about the bathroom situation. But you know what else you're going to need if you're in space for more than a week? You're going to need a shower.
Skylab built a pop-up shower system centered in the station where you would stand and then you would raise this like ring thing that looks like one of those like kids play tubes that they crawl through. and it connects from the floor to the ceiling and it locks in place and then all of the water is contained in that tube connected from top to bottom. And it doesn't really take up space because then it goes down to the floor and it's good. It's pretty good idea.
To me, the R &D on that shower, they should have split their time and had a little more R &D on the toilet situation. That's my opinion as a person who is a little... more focused than maybe others on bathrooms on his day to day life. As NASA continued to blaze the way in the skies, they looked around and realized, by God, we've been sending only people with mail equipment into space. What if we have to send a lady folk? What are we going to do?
Well, when the space shuttle program arrived, NASA had a number of new challenges. Longer wait times for launch, the need to improve the current waste management system. And there's ladies in space now. Women, you're going to space. It's exciting. One of those updates was they took like, they updated the diaper for women, but it's also for men, like why not? Or they took space diaper 1.0 and they made space diaper 2.0 and it could hold almost four cups of urine.
That's a 32 ounce hydroflask or Nalgene, whichever person you are, 32 ounces of pee. That's a lot. That's a lot. Like, yeah, they've leveled up the absorbency game. And these were allowed, and like, can we get that technology on like, shammy's for cars? That's all I'm saying. Anyway, but these allow women to pee during longer launch sequences. And men, like, what are we doing? It's fine. They also got a toilet upgrade, now called the Waste Collection System.
The toilet has a number of new handles and straps.
And need I say, strips to strap yourself into to keep yourself from floating off and away while pushing the logo they had a lot of updates that they needed to do and it's exciting but they had to like all these straps and things it's one of those things where like I imagine you you know you like sit down and like those comic books where the guy like farts and he takes off up into the sky but like you got to strap yourself in to keep yourself from blasting off that is
what I imagine when they say, we put straps on the toilet to like strap yourself in. That has to be some of the fear they had. The opening on this toilet was less than four inches in diameter. Now, if you hear that and you go, well, I don't know, that seems fine. Like a standard toilet, the one I'm sitting on is between a foot and 16 inches. We're talking like a quarter to a third the whole. This is not enough. This is smaller than a cereal bowl, most likely. Unreal.
Drastically smaller basket to make the shot into. NASA reports that in order to help their testing, they installed a camera. Sweet lord, help us all. A camera that would, quote, peer up at the users, and this is unquote, and this is where I put my word in, bungholio, and allow them to adjust their aim in real time. So NASA has installed what is essentially like those rear parking cameras for your SUV except for it's below deck in the toilet and the camera is aimed directly up at your sphincter.
As you try to like position your hole for maximum aim and splash power. If you wiped, the paper went into a separate receptacle from the brown. You're not including it with it. So there are improvements, but as you can see, there's still more room for improvements. It still had all the suction and vacuuming and drying capabilities that those astronauts had come to know and love. We didn't get rid of the suction power. Hooray, or maybe not.
Over time, NASA continued research and development and now the hole is about the size of a dinner plate. That's good because you don't want to have to do that much aiming when you don't have gravity helping you out. The excrement is still stored but now it's stored below deck in a containment area. Astronauts report that when the tank gets full you glove up and you squash it down.
uh A lesson by the way that I would love any person to take to heart, when you see a trash that's kind of topped off, squash it down. I imagine they draw straws for that job. The waste eventually gets sent out on a cargo ship and they report eventually it burns up as it hurdles toward Earth. You're a shooting star. That is what you are. A piece of poo. Burning as you shoot. No, they shoot their poo into outer space and it burns up on its way back to Earth. What a world.
For urine, a perhaps even more dark tail has ensued. They have a separate container for taking the pee. This gets stored and filtered. and is reused as the astronauts drinking water. I'm sorry, but that is a barrier for entry for me. I don't care how good the filter is, you know. You know where that came from. And you're gonna be left knowing. It didn't just, just come from you. Like, you have fellow astronauts. Is this Becky's wee? Man, I saw him drink like a like a 24 ounce thing yesterday.
I bet I'm gonna get up on that right now. That ain't right It's claimed that the astronauts are have have been quoted as saying Today's coffee is tomorrow's coffee. That's too far coffee does some weird stuff to your Wii. So like why did you have to pick coffee? Don't that no today's coffee should never be tomorrow's coffee unless you're reheating it because it just sat in the thing, which I do all the time. I am who I am.
If you go out of the space station on a space walk, you wear an even more leveled up version of Super Diaper. Super Diaper version 2.5, so that's cool. And Russia sent up an even better version of a space toilet. In 2008, Russia shot a better version of a space toilet, which now can differentiate between liquid and solid deposits. It begs the questions though, What does it do with diarrhea? Like that's my question for science and NASA and Russia NASA. I don't know what it's called. Russia NASA.
What do you do with diarrhea? What is the new fancy toilet that can like tell the difference? What does it do with liquid poo? In 2017, NASA reached outside itself and issued a challenge to the scientific and engineering community. Design a device where in astronauts who may be outside the station for possibly days at a time. could use the bathroom from the spacesuit. Targets now set on exploring and living possibly one day. Leon, shout out to the surface of Mars.
The bounty for designing this was a mere, I know his name is not Leon. I understand. It's a joke. Leon Musk. The bounty for designing this contraption that would allow you to go longer, $15,000. NASA has big money. they have a lot a lot of money. 15 grand is chump change. Like, up the ante NASA. Come on. Especially considering the last bathroom upgrade that NASA did for the International Space Station cost 23 million dollars. 15 thousand? Like, it's a sweet deal, but like, come on. The winner...
The contraption that won was designed by Dr. Thatcher Cardin and he made a device that looked like a docking station for the astro crotch. Where the bag would be hooked up, cr-clunk, and excrement would be collected into the bag and then you would like unseal it from the crotch. And somehow space people could also change their undies through this port. Space crotch port. and opens you up to having like a backup diaper you throw a backup diaper on.
He also claims that you would be able to do naval surgeries, surgeries through the belly button, through these ports, endless possibilities with the fun crotch ports. For the most part though, the answer to how astronauts go to the bathroom in space... is they strap a diaper on or they go into a very expensive vacuum. And most of what they have was kept for research or God knows what else, drinking tomorrow. I've never been in space. I've never been in zero gravity.
I don't have an anecdote for this. I could lie, but that's not who I am. But I do have an experiment. As they're designing these spacesuits and they're figuring out how to go in a spacesuit, I would posit if you could expel it at a great enough force, could you use the expulsion if you got trapped outside the station? Two movies to give you context for this thought experiment. First movie, the movie Gravity.
When she gets stuck outside, I can't remember, she gets stuck outside the rocket ship and she's probably gonna Yeah, so she like throws the wrench and the negative force is enough to push her away. Pretty cool. Now instead of a wrench, it's poop. Second, the image of like Wally like spraying the fire extinguisher and he's like flying across the thing. That's what I'm talking about. Could you use the negative force created by pushing human fecal matter or human pee matter out of your body?
To jettison you to safety if needed. And if Mr. Carden's sweet spaceport is a check mark yes to that, I think we got something on our hands here. That's the real big questions on our mind. Be thankful you have gravity. Going to poop and pee in zero gravity sounds like no fun. Imagine missing and you just got little bubbles of pee floating around by your head. It's not ideal. It's not even desired in any way. But here in Privy, we've gone to space today.
And by that I mean I didn't leave my home bathroom. So there's that. I hope you enjoyed. This has been another episode of Privy. We would like to, as always, we would love for you to reach out to us, connect with us on social media. We're on all those things at Privycast or Send us an email privycast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you have ideas about how space is going to interact with propelling you, we'd love to hear it.
As always, we want to thank Kevin McLeod for the use of Bar Room Ballet as our intro and outro music. You can find his music at incompetech.org and his music is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0. Thanks, Kevin. And now this has been another episode of Privy. Thank you for joining us. And as always... Don't forget to flush. There's a myth a lot of us grow up believing that hair loss is just a part of life. It happens. It runs in the family. Once it starts, there's no stopping it.
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