Carmi Levy

It sounds silly, but a spaceship without a toilet is a real problem, Carmi.

You know, we can make all the crappy jokes we want, but the reality is you got four people in a vehicle the size of a minivan

uh and eventually they're gonna have to go pick a number and if that thing doesn't work uh it's gonna lead to a real bad time for everyone else and as they got into orbit you know the first order of business was okay let's let's make sure that everything is working that it's that it's supposed to like because there's a pretty shaky ride up into orbit a lot of rocking and rolling

So they check out all their systems and the toilet is one of those critical, you know, biological systems, biological support systems that needs to work.

And the fan on it wasn't working properly.

And as it turned out, you could do a number two, but not a number one.

And so...

They started troubleshooting it on the ground, and they were calling up instructions to the mission specialist, Christina Koch, and she was essentially being like a plumber.

She was removing parts, adding parts, reconfiguring, whatever.

And then just before bed, she asked, okay, so where are we at on the problem?

And they said that overnight they could use it as much as they wished.

And so it looks like problem solved, disaster averted.

Jared Isaacman, who's the NASA administrator, when he flew into space for the first time, his capsule, he was on a Crew Dragon, that also had a pretty lousy toilet.

And they had problems for the entire four days they were in orbit.

So this is a common problem.

We've had it on ISS.

We've had it on shuttle.

They've had it on Soyuz.

Now they've had it on

Orion.