NASA’s return to the moon just hit an awkward problem: the toilet is failing

As American astronauts fly to the moon for the first time in 50 years, the test flight has gone off without a hitch, almost. Happily, this time around, the “Houston, we’ve had a problem” moment came with much lower stakes than Apollo 13’s oxygen leak. NASA’s Artemis II is the first crewed mission featuring a proper toilet – a major upgrade from the Apollo-era days of astronauts chasing runaway bodily emissions in zero gravity. Historically, waste capture was handled by a crude system of plastic bags attached to spacesuits, a headache for astronauts already contending with the many life-threatening challenges of space travel. So far, the high tech toilet has come with some problems of its own. Toilet troubles Shortly after launching, a blinking fault light signaled that the toilet was acting up. That problem caused the space loo to be closed for repairs during the mission’s first six hours, a short interval of time but long enough to force at least one astronaut to resort to relie