00:00And finally, on Wednesday, four NASA astronauts will blast off in an Artemis II rocket for a
00:0510-day mission around the moon. The whole thing is really rather jazzy. After blast-off,
00:10this smarty pants group will be slingshot around the moon in a capsule the size of a camper.
00:15And the camper is also rather jazzy because inside there sits a toilet. Might as well be
00:21fit for a king or queen because everything is relative, of course. The bathroom is one place
00:26in this 330 cubic feet of space that the crew will have all to themselves individually. I know
00:33you've likely spent very little time considering how astronauts evacuate in space, but here you go.
00:39Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who will join three Americans on the adventure,
00:44gave a TMI tour of the facilities recently. During the mission, we'll have to change out that solid
00:49waste canister a few times and all of that comes back to Earth with us. As far as the urine
00:55goes,
00:55it gets collected, and a few times a day we vent that urine to space. We're pretty fortunate as a
01:03crew to have a toilet with a door on this tiny spacecraft, the one place that we can go during
01:10the mission where we could actually feel like we're alone for a moment. Back in the day, space
01:16johns were pretty primitive, but this Lockheed Martin-designed toilet is quite a development
01:21compared to the original Apollo missions. The Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's of the world
01:26peed into roll-on catheters and collected number two in plastic bags, pretty much without any privacy.
01:33All those brains, all that training, all that money for baggies. Now, the Artemis 2 mission is the first
01:39in a series with the goal of returning humans to the surface of the moon and eventually to Mars.
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