Space crap: Flap, zap or strap? $30k from NASA for your pooper scooper Time is ticking away if you want to enter NASA's competition for the public to suggest an astronaut ablution solution. While the PR team must be delighted with their title of "Space Poop Challenge" the more officious procurement language of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration is even sweeter: NASA seeks …
Add a laxative and you'd just need suction. It's also multi-function as you'd use more laxative if anyone has a cough (they wouldn't dare cough then). In with the incoming president you already have a name for the collected, er, "extract" too: a Trump think tank.
There we go, sorted. Any other problems I can help with? I'll take my mega million dollar funding in advance, thanks.
If all your nourishment is liquid you will still defaecate, at a lower rate, to eliminate dead cells from your intestine and bile. That would still be true even if all your food and water intake was intravenous.
Nonetheless, your suggestion might make an anal pl^H^Htampon viable for 6 days.
I'm wondering if there's any mileage in a system that makes use of the close proximity of a hard vacuum to assist in freeze/vaccum drying the unwanted material?
Humans are really not well designed for space travel, are we? Can we use CRISPR to genetically modify astronauts to have a larger bowel and 5-gallon bladder?
> Humans are really not well designed for space travel, are we?
We just have incomparable ports ...
If I was in charge, I'd require spacefarers to undergo surgery to fit fitting a couple well designed stoma that can connect to a standardised waste disposal / recycling system.
A flap at the back.
Seriously though, disposing of six days worth of shit is going to be a challenge, without some kind of double-balloon catheter system.
Mind you, I once had a girlfriend who only had one BM a week. It had to be cut up with a knife before it would flush. They just need to find others with similar bowels.
Did they just teleport the waste out of you?
According to the not-so-canon Star Trek Technical Manual, transporter technology was involved. It re-patterned waste material as feedstock for other systems, like those that produce a cuppa Earl Gray for captains. This led to the Star Fleet saying, "Flush twice, it's a long way to the kitchen."
Getting into a modern space suit is a lot more complicated than putting a coat on. Modern suits work on a lowered atmospheric pressure (with enhanced oxygen levels to make sure that the O2 partial pressure is maintained), so an astronaut has to pre-breath oxygen for a while to flush out the nitrogen that is disolved in his/her bloodstream. Failing to do this correctly is asking for a sift dose of the "bends"; ask any deep-sea diver how much fun that is.
A System that NASA have used for decades and seems harmless until something happens and the whole crew die because they can't waste all that time p**sing about with pre-breathing O2.
Still have trouble believing they could have devised such a stupid system.
It's not it's got to be backward compatible with Mercury/Gemini/Apollo or even Shuttle.
"Your solution will also need to be quick to integrate with the space suit [...] in incidents of sudden "cabin depressurization" though we don't imagine convenience would be much barrier to evacuation in such circumstances."
I disagree. In a really grave incident you'll need the automatic pooper scooper more than ever.
The engineer in me will now employ vacant computation cycles in my brain to contemplate this problem. So I guess that for the foreseeable future I will think about tubes into rectum and bags of faecal matter in pointless meetings, while sitting on the bus, taking a shower and eating breakfast. And worse, before I go to sleep and therefore probably in my dreams also.
I'm not sure I want to even contemplate the act of taking a dump a space suit where spreading you legs and squatting is nigh on impossible if not actually impossible. I expect it's either going to be very messy with enormous skid-marks or involve a very large catheter.
I expect it's either going to be very messy with enormous skid-marks or involve a very large catheter.
The former. US suits currently use space diapers, the "maximum absorbency garment."
When the US only had a male astronaut corps a condom-like sleeve was used for urine instead of a catheter. However, it was found that the wearer tended to slip out owing to changing size over the course of a day. When women joined the astronaut corps, NASA shifted to diaper-type systems for both males and females. This simplified the system and eliminated a failure mode.
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