Space toilets

In 1961, when Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space, went up in the Freedom 7 spacecraft, he was not expecting a three-hour delay. Desperate for a pee, Shepard had to go in his space suit and he blasted off with wet underwear.
As space travel took off, scientists hadn’t quite worked out how to let astronauts do their business. Often, they just strapped a bag to their bottoms, but this quickly caused chaos inside spaceships as poo flew everywhere because of reduced gravity (the force that keeps your feet on the ground and poo in the toilet). Even the astronauts who walked on the Moon left a mess on the lunar surface. The Apollo astronauts left a total of 96 bags of waste, including pee and poo, at their lunar landing sites. These “poo bags” are still there today.
Nowadays, going to the toilet on the International Space Station (a very big spacecraft that goes around the Earth) is a little more high tech. A toilet with a suction tube sucks up the waste as soon as the lid is opened, stopping poo from flying everywhere. But what happens to the waste after it is collected? The pee is recycled into water that astronauts can drink, and the poo is sent to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. In future, scientists could have other uses for astronaut pee and poo. One idea is using astronaut urine to build moon bricks for lunar houses. Urea, a type of chemical found in your pee, could be mixed wi...