Astronauts Repair Space Toilet
The space station astronauts are flush with victory.
June 4, 2008 — -- Cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko is flush with victory. Kononenko, of Russia, transformed Wednesday morning from an astronaut into a plumber to successfully repair the only toilet at the International Space Station.
His two-hour repair of the space station's toilet appears to have worked, and the crew is testing it out, according to NASA. Kononenko installed a new pump that was brought up on the space shuttle Discovery on Monday.
There is only one bathroom on the space station, in the Russian segment, and it has gone through three pumps in the past week and a half. The crew on the space station pinned their hopes on the brand-new pump from a different manufacturing batch, which appears to have finally fixed the problem.
An orbiting toilet, for lack of gravity, uses fans to pump waste into storage tanks. One system, for solid waste, has worked fine; the liquid-waste system stopped last month.
When Discovery docked at the International Space Station Monday afternoon, the station's three crew members were ready to welcome their colleagues — and the spare parts they were bringing to fix the toilet.
Shuttle Commander Mark Kelly opened the hatch and joked, "Anyone here call for a plumber?"
Space Station flight engineer Garrett Riesman responded, "We thought you all were on a lunch break. What took you so long?"
It turned into a headache for Reisman and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Kononenko, who could not get the toilet to work with the spare parts they had on board. They were spending a couple of hours a day working a manual pump to keep the system going.
A fully functioning bathroom is mandatory for the space station; it is a flight rule that the toilet work.
Abandoning the space station if they can't get the toilet to work would be the last resort, said space station deputy program manager Kirk Shireman.
"If the ISS toilet is unusable, we can make it to the next Progress flight by a combination of urine collection devices used in research, plus something called the Russian ring collector, to collect liquid waste," Shireman said in a briefing Tuesday night. "At this point in time we don't believe the space station would be forced into a de-crewing situation. We also have a back method to collect solid waste if that fails, in bags. Neither of these is particularly pleasant, but they are tried and true and can be used in this situation."
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