The Space Toilet

Astronaut Chris Hadfield explains how to go to the bathroom in space.

Find out more:

Twitter: twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AstronautChrisHadfield?fref=ts
Google+: plus.google.com/113978637743265603454/posts/p/pub

When you go to the bathroom on earth,

you're relying on gravity...pretty, pretty heavily

Imagine if you're half way done and somebody shut off gravity

It'd be a mess and you'd float of the toilet

So, when we designed our space toilet

first to a seat belt on it, to hold you down

and then, we decided to separate solids and liquids because it is easier to store that way

So, we just have tube that you pee into, and have air pulled to the tube

so it's not a big deal

For the women, there's a cup that fits-up against them,

For the guy , it's just a little tunnel, you just pee into the stupid

it goes into a sewage tank

But the solids that come out of your body ,

that's a harder problem to solve

And it's an important medical one,

because on Earth everything falls on the floor

But in space it's gonna float around

So it'll really make you sick

If you re-ingest something that came out of your body

it will really make you sick

And we can't afford to get that sick

So we designed a toilet that,

instead of gravity pulling everything into the toilet,

it has air flow

There's air pulled down into the toilet

-- Sort of windy when you're sitting there

But it pulls everything out of your body

Everything that comes out of your body

gets pulled down into the toilet by the air

and then in the storage tank we just expose that to the vaccum of space ,

so it basically just freeze-dries everything

So it killes all the bacteria

so there's no smell

And then we store it

And then when we have a whole bunch if stored

we put in a little unmanned supply ship

and then we undock it and then it burns up in the atmosphere

So the next time you see a beautiful shooting star going across the sky

that's what it might be