“Gravity-Defying Dilemmas: The Ingenious Solutions Astronauts Use to Conquer the Ultimate Space Challenge!”
To ensure a tight seal and minimize leakage, the hole in the WCS seat was only 100 millimetres or 4 inches in diameter – much smaller than on a conventional toilet. Precise positioning of the user’s body was therefore essential, and prior to flight astronauts underwent extensive training on a space toilet simulator – no, really – at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas. This simulator featured lights to indicate to the trainee if they were in the proper position, as well as an internal camera to allow an instructor to check the trainee’s alignment (and you thought your work onboarding was awkward…). As every body is different, each astronaut quickly learned what position worked best for them. As veteran American astronaut Mike Massimo explains:
“I think of Peter Fonda in Easy Rider. That’s the right position for me.”
Adding to the indignity, the genuine article aboard the Space Shuttle itself featured a microphone so flight surgeons back on earth could monitor the astronauts’ bowel sounds and gauge their overall digestive health. This, in turn, led to the creation of what has to be the least glamorous job in the history of space exploration. In the early days of the Shuttle program, NASA was often contracted by the U.S. military to deploy top-secret surveillance satellites from the orbiter’s cargo bay. Military intelligence worried that the microphone on the WCS might accidentally pick up conversations about the classified payload, and so some unfortunate officer was tasked with listening to days of astronaut bowel sounds to ensure that no national secrets leaked out. Now your boring day job doesn’t sound so bad, does it? The only saving grace is that while the flight surgeon could hear an astronauts’ every sound, their fellow crewmates couldn’t. Despite the WCS being separated from the rest of the cabin by only a thin curtain, the sound of various pumps and other onboard systems was so loud that the astronauts could use the facilities in relative sonic privacy.
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