SpaceX says it has fixed the leaky space toilet with just a few days left before the next Crew Dragon spacecraft launch. The company will be launching a mission to the International Space Station and a fifth crewed mission into orbit.
It was the company’s race against time, given the stakes involved for the mission. No astronaut wants to take off to space knowing there is human urine coming out of the toilet system. It also reminds us that just how important toilets are in space, without a functional one, space exploration could be hampered to a great extent, something NASA understood over five decades ago.
Fixing the toilet is paramount
Space travelers that went aboard the Inspiration4 mission ran into some unexpected issues with the toilet onboard. Tubes inside the toilet became unglued that let urine spray into an area beneath the floor of the capsule.
“We didn’t really even notice it, the crew didn’t even notice it, until we got back,” Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX official, as quoted by The New York Times. “When we got the vehicle back, we looked under the floor and saw the fact that there was contamination underneath the floor of Inspiration4.”
The same issue happened on a Crew Dragon capsule which previously went to the ISS with a crew of four members, as per the Times report. That had SpaceX engineers worried that the same thing could happen once again during the upcoming launch. But the company claims to have fixed the issue.
No harm was done in previous flights
“For Crew-3, we’ve fixed this problem in the tank by essentially making an all-welded structure with no longer joints in there that can come unglued and become disconnected,”
Gerstenmaier said during a press conference. Gerstenmaier also noted that the metal used to attach the compartment housing the urine was never in danger of failing, which means that the previous two spacecraft didn’t take any damage. “Luckily, or, on purpose, we chose an aluminum alloy that is very insensitive to corrosion,” Gerstenmaier told reporters.
