As astronauts at the International Space Station look forward to their return home on Sunday, one challenge lingers deep in their bowels.
The capsule being used to transport the crew home has a broken toilet, leaving the crew with all but one option – diapers.
NASA astronaut Megan McArthur said the situation is “suboptimal” but manageable. The flight home will take around 20 hours. “Spaceflight is full of lots of little challenges…this is just one more that we’ll encounter and take care of in our mission.”
Mission managers met multiple times on Friday and eventually concluded that they’d bring McArthur and the rest of her crew home prior to the launch of their replacements. After experiencing numerous delays caused by bad weather and an undisclosed medical issue, SpaceX targets liftoff for Wednesday night at the earliest.
Fellow crewmember Thomas Pesquet shared with reporters that the last six months were intense up in space, as the team conducted a series of spacewalks to upgrade the station’s power grid, endured inadvertent thruster firings as Russian vehicles that were docked sent the station into brief spins, and hosted a private Russian film crew – a space station first.
The toilet leak that is now hindering the crew’s return home also caused problems on board, as they would pull up panels and find pools of urine. The capsule awaiting liftoff has had this issue fixed, but Engineers determined that the capsule in space had not been structurally compromised and was safe for the crew’s return home. The team will be relying on NASA’s described absorbent “undergarments.”
Alongside McArthur and Pesquet are Shane Kimbrough and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide. The capsule they took up into space is certified for a maximum of 210 days – Friday marks their 196th day in the great beyond.