No. 1, No. 2 priorities neglected on space station
Forty years after the historic first moon landing, we still have not managed to send a plumber into space.
The price for this regrettable lapse became apparent Sunday, on the very anniversary of the moon landing, when NASA revealed the toilet aboard the International Space Station is out of service. This is the second time the Russian-made space toilet has been out of service. The toilet's air-gas separator ancillary pump, after repeated malfunctions, was replaced less than a year ago at a cost of more than a million dollars.
"Clearly, having a working toilet is a priority for us," a NASA official said at the time. I guess that's why they call it No. 1 and No. 2.
Now the replacement reportedly won't flush and none of the 13 astronauts on board, including assorted physicists, aerospace engineers, test pilots, scientists, a medical doctor, two Canadian Space Agency brainiacs and an ex-U.S. Navy Seal, can't fix the thing. Now we know why plumbers charge as much as they do.
Not that the space toilet is especially complicated. It looks like a funnel attached to the end of a vacuum hose. Before they replace the million-dollar pump again, I'd try a plunger or a snake.
As it is, the space toilet's failure only confirms the world's space agencies are not ready for a manned mission to Mars. The mission would take two years, which is one year, 11 months, three weeks and four days longer than the crew could go without a toilet. This might not be an issue if the astronauts were put into in some kind of induced hibernation. When they woke up, however, they would not want to hear that the toilet was out of order.
Aboard the space station, the situation is not so dire. Astronauts are using an emergency back-up toilet in the Russian part of the space station and also the toilet aboard the docked space shuttle Endeavour. Should one of these back-up toilets fail, there are plastic "waste collection bags" as used by the Apollo-era astronauts. The bags have a sticky edge around the opening that adheres to the astronaut to prevent any waste from escaping. Behold the glamour of space travel. You get more comfortable accommodations on Air Canada Jazz.
A malfunctioning toilet is never convenient, but in this case the timing could not have been worse. The 13 astronauts on board are the most ever on the space station. Maybe that's more than any air-gas separator ancillary pump can handle. Maybe this is the limiting factor in space travel. Sure, we can develop warp drive to travel across the universe at speeds faster than light, but we better go to the bathroom before we leave.
This latest mission comes as the space shuttle program is winding down. With the shuttles due for retirement next year, NASA is taking manned space exploration in a new direction. The plan now is for a series of missions to establish a manned station on the moon by 2018. This would serve as a resource and perhaps a base for future manned space missions elsewhere. In other words, the moon is more of a pit stop than a destination. That's because the moon itself holds no great appeal. Without elaborate life support systems, humans cannot survive there for more than a few seconds. This is a place to avoid, not to visit, except, perhaps, as a jumping off place to somewhere else The problem is that there is nowhere else to go, at least nowhere more inviting. Mars doesn't qualify. It's as hostile to life as the moon and a lot further away. You'd go to the moon and back 150 times to cover the distance one-way to Mars. That's a long way to go for a dry well. Even so, manned space travel will persist, if only to serve the vast, international apparatus devoted to manned space travel.
