(CNN) — The four astronauts on the Artemis II mission had very few in-flight issues, but one they had to deal with was the toilet.
The Artemis II crew’s 16.5-foot-wide (5-meter-wide) Orion capsule experienced a waste management-related problem that arose in the early hours of Saturday as Day 3 was winding down.
“It’s an issue with dumping the waste out of the toilet,” Artemis II Flight Director Judd Frieling told reporters Saturday morning. “And so it appears to me that we probably have some frozen urine in the vent line.”
The astronauts — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — were still fast asleep by midmorning nearly 200,000 miles (nearly 320,000 kilometers) from Earth as mission controllers continued to troubleshoot the issue. And by Saturday afternoon, early in Day 4 of the flight, mission controllers had a plan of attack: to warm up the frozen line by rotating the capsule to put the frozen urine into the sun.
That appeared to partially unclog the pipe, allowing the capsule to expel some of the urine from the wastebasket-size tank into the vacuum of space.
Efforts to fix the commode continued throughout Saturday, but stubborn clogs prevented a full cleanout. Until, at last, around midnight Eastern time, mission control delivered the long-awaited update: “Breaking news,” mission control’s capsule communicator, Jacki Mahaffey, told the crew. “You are go for all types of use of the toilet.”
“And the crew rejoices!” Koch replied. “Thank you!”
The frozen vent line was not the crew’s only run-in with toilet troubles.
Shortly after launching to orbit from NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, the crew realized the toilet’s pump wasn’t working. Pumps are important and used for a variety of reasons, including assisting with pulling waste from the body. In space, there is no gravity to assist with such expulsions.
That problem had a relatively straightforward fix: The crewmembers simply hadn’t put in enough water to prime the pump. After they topped that off, the system began functioning as intended.
The astronauts celebrated that small victory on Thursday during a virtual interview with news media.
“I’m proud to call myself the space plumber,” Koch said. “We were all breathing a sigh of relief when it turned out to be just fine. We did originally think that there could have been potentially something fouling up the motor.”
‘The most important piece of equipment’
The onboard toilet is perhaps the spaceflight amenity held most dear to astronauts who value creature comforts.
“I like to say that it is probably the most important piece of equipment on board,” Koch added during her Thursday dispatch from Orion.
Collins Aerospace holds a roughly $30 million contract, inked in 2015, to design and adapt the technology, known as the Universal Waste Management System or UWMS, for Orion.
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