Cosmic Commode Can’t Cope

To boldly go! As a child watching the moon landing I dreamed of when I would be an adult when humans would go on to conquer space — and at the dawn of the 21st Century we seem to be dealing with plumbing issues instead of reaching for the stars:

Space Station Toilet Breaks Again

“The master bathroom for three astronauts aboard the International Space Station is on the fritz again just days before a trio of new spaceflyers are due to launch toward the orbiting lab, NASA officials said Friday.

A temporary telemetry glitch also sent the space station into a so-called survival mode earlier this morning, changing the outpost’s attitude and leading to system power downs for several hours. That issue was quickly tracked to an electronics box aboard the station, but the balky space toilet in the Russian Zvezda service module continues to plague astronauts and flight controllers.

“It failed late yesterday,” NASA spokesperson John Ira Petty said of the Russian-built space commode in televised commentary from Mission Control in Houston. “Russian specialists are troubleshooting. The problem appears to be a [gas] separator issue”.”