Remember when the toilet on NASA’s manned, moon-bound rocket ship malfunctioned this spring?
Well, the astronauts who were there do. NC State students got the full, behind-the-scenes story on Tuesday from mission specialist Christina Koch, who dealt with the toilet malfunction firsthand.
Koch, who flew to the dark side of the moon on the Orion spacecraft this spring as part of the Artemis II mission, is an alumnus of NC State University. This week, she returned to campus for a series of events welcoming her back to Earth.
On Tuesday afternoon, she took questions from students about her approach to her work — including one about the broken toilet.
“When it first did not start up, we saw our life flash before our eyes,” Koch said. “When the fault light came on, we were like: ‘Oh no, this is not what we wanted to happen. We’re prepared for this, but it’s definitely not what we wanted to happen.’”
Koch was the only woman aboard the four-person flight, which she said also made her “the most proactive” in trying to fix the toilet and preparing their alternate means of using the bathroom. “I think the guys were willing to wait a little while for the real toilet to be fixed,” she said.
In the first part of a space flight, it’s very hard to do anything, she said. “It feels like you’re standing on your head, and you get very sick,” she said. But her first job once the last engine cut out was to fix the toilet.
“It 100% became the top priority,” she said.
News outlets at the time reported that Koch took point on fixing the toilet, calling herself “the space plumber.”
But she told NC State students on Tuesday that she had a confession to make.
“I did not get out any wrenches or anything fancy to fix the toilet,” Koch said. “I just did what the ground team told me to do and started it up in a little bit of a different sequence.”
She has fixed a lot of toilets on the International Space Station “for real,” she said, but this one wasn’t set up for that kind of hands-on repair work.
She said that when she first told her crewmates she wanted to tell the world that reality, they told her “not to let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
But she said she’d tell the students “the true story of what happened with the toilet in Orion.”
The vent that releases the astronauts’ waste into space clogged, and the crew never actually got it unclogged, she said. Toward the end of the mission, the toilet ended up breaking again.
They had to use “collapsible contingency urine containers,” she said, which hook up to a secondary, backup vent. But those containers don’t have the vacuum feature that make it possible to use the bathroom neatly in low-gravity conditions.
“When you go to the bathroom, stuff doesn’t go where you need it to go,” she said. “... We did have a little bit more of a struggle physically getting the pee where it needed to go.”