Pretty nifty, as long as proper etiquette is followed and venting is performed away from peers.
Cool. Iād be drinking a gallon of water before every spacewalkā¦
My goal would be to create a nice Saturnian ring around the earth.
Froil.
Breeze.
And donāt piss into the solar wind.
Iām kind of floored by the idea of a spacesuit thatās set up to vent urine into space. It seems like kind of a lot of hardware to add to a suit, and you really really wouldnāt want it to fail. Like, did the suits have little airlocks at the crotch or what? I need to research this
Im wondering too, there can be no hands involved.
Are they wearing rubber diapers that funnel the liquid into a tube and an airlock? Too messy back inside.
How about a hose and a clamp to āengageā the spacemen, and a funnel and a strap for the spaceladies?
And why do they need to expel out of the suit? Why not just a standard diaper and maybe not drink so much liquid beforehand?
Or is the whole program a complicated ruse so guys can go pee in space?
I assume they meant from the spacecraft and not the suit. But then again, pissing on the moon does sound like a lot like other Johnson administration policies.
3 unusually banal words: Maximum Absorbency Garment
Due to the fact that part of my road to happy-mutanthood hinged greatly on the book compilations of Cecil Adamsā The Straight Dope, and to whom I feel no small amount of allegience, I will be the wet blanket who informs you all that this is old news ('84, actually) :
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2427/would-a-glass-of-water-in-space-freeze-or-boil
final paragraph:
When the astronauts take a leak while on a mission and expel the result into space, it boils violently. The vapor then passes immediately into the solid state (a process known as desublimation), and you end up with a cloud of very fine crystals of frozen tinkle.
oh shit! palagirism alert! oh, okay, they were quoting the Adams article. except they misquoted. Meduim wrote āurineā and the quote was ātinkle.ā
Space shuttles donāt have much space on board for the little extras, like bodily waste, so they regularly have to release them to lighten their load. When urine is released from the exit nozzle it freezes immediately and āinstantly flashes into 10 million little ice crystals which go out almost in a hemisphereā¦a spray of sparklers, almostā (say Scientific American anyway). And it gets better, once those little droplets are crystals, the sun then hits them and transforms them into water vapour to create a kind of mesmerizing cloud of human bodily fluids.
I donāt think it counts as plagiarism if you put it in block quotes and provide a link to the original
yeah, I just checked the Medium article. reading it on BB, it was not made clear that the Medium author was linking and quoting the same article I had read. except Adams said ātinkleā not āurine,ā so I assumed the worst. my B. (ETA: fixed above)
I considered that, but I have seen camera footage showing the shuttle vent so I didnāt understand what the EVA was all about.
Just do not piss against the wind.
Oh ā¦ wait ā¦ never-mind
āThe most beautiful sight in orbitā¦is a urine dump at sunsetā
ā Russell āRustyā Schweickart, Apollo 9
At one point during either Apollo 15 or 16, the crew broke off the nozzle for for water dispenser and flooded the floor of the LM with several litres of water. The leak was quickly stopped and engineers on the ground had to scramble to find ways to mop the water up and dispose of it. The water couldnāt have been left there for the next EVA because it would have deposited ice throughout the interior of the vehicle while it was in vacuum, and the waste container could only take some of the water, so a lot of it was put into sealed containers and taken outside the next morning. The water would have boiled for a while and frozen. It probably sublimated in the days after the end of the mission.
Thereās a line in Apollo 13 when Kevin Bacon vents the toilet and murmurs, āLadies and gentlemen, the constellation U-rion.ā The movie is heavily based on the actual crew tapes.
