Last month, the SpaceX Inspiration4 crew onboard Cargo Dragon seemed to get along swimmingly with urine. However, there was an issue buried beneath the floorboards.
That problem sprang from the bathroom, hidden in the Crew Dragon spaceship's ceiling and cloaked in mystery. A tube delivering urine from the bathroom burst beneath the spaceship's cabin floor spilled its contents onto a fan.
That fan is used to produce suction for the toilet, which is important because there is no force dragging waste in any one direction when you're in microgravity. The urine was then sprayed all over the secret chamber by the fan.
However, while Inspiration4 was in orbit, a technical fault with the bathroom fan triggered an alert, compelling the passengers to troubleshoot, Isaacman told CNN Business in September. He didn't say how they came up with the solution. SpaceX technicians opened the cabin floor to check the fan issue after the spacecraft returned to Earth. That's when the pee leak was detected.
SpaceX will send four NASA astronauts to the International Space Station this Halloween weekend, Science Times said. The tube should no longer come "unglued" with the latest modification.
Nobody Noticed That Inspiration4 Took A Urine Bath, Expert Says
According to the New York Times, William Gerstenmaier, the SpaceX vice president who formerly worked for NASA, said that the body fluids were gathered under the floor of the Resilience capsule.
They didn't even notice it, according to Gerstenmaier. The team didn't see it either until they returned. They investigated beneath the floor and discovered pollution beneath the Inspiration4 floor.
The Elon Musk-led business will use the same toilet design for Sunday's Crew-3 flight, transporting a new group of professional astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX will upgrade the toilet system, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has promised on Twitter. According to Science Times, engineers recently rectified the issue.
Definitely upgraded toilets :) We had some challenges with it this flight.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2021
Broken Toilet Issue
Science Times said there were reports circulated that an alarm had gone off while the four were in orbit shortly after Jared Isaacman, Sian Proctor, Haley Arceneaux, and Christopher Sembroski returned to Earth,
The problem turned out to be a broken toilet, which wasn't discovered until the team returned. The problem with the original bathroom plumbing might harm the Endeavour spacecraft, which carried SpaceX's Crew-2 mission to the International Space Station in late April.
SpaceX urged the astronauts aboard the space station to snake a camera down a cable into the pee-tube compartment beneath the floor. According to Business Insider, the astronauts fear the same bathroom problems. They, too, encountered the same problem as Inspiration4.
Check out more news and information on SpaceX in Science Times.
