There’s a renewed interest to return humans to the moon. But to achieve this vision, one challenge of space travel—and a taboo topic even on Earth—needs to be solved. More than 50 years ago, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he’d stored his bodily waste in poo bags that were left behind—and, to this day, they still sit on the moon. In this entertaining essay, Becky Ferreira discusses the logistics of going to the bathroom in space—and what the entire process of waste management and disposal might look like.
At the dawn of the Space Age, American crews literally just taped a bag on their butts when they had to go, a system that infamously resulted in escaped turds floating through the Apollo 10 command module, and astronaut Frank Borman’s decision to simply not poop for more than a week on Gemini 7 to avoid the attendant indignities.
In other words, there’s a very small chance that human poop microbes could interfere with alien moon life. This is an exceedingly improbable outcome, given the inhospitable nature of the moon, but because it is a possibility, Mark Lupisella, an exploration integration manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has proposed a robotic mission to procure samples from the poo bags at one of the Apollo landing sites.
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