Apollo 10 The Mission That Saw Turds Take Flight In Space

While listening to an episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, I heard the story of some rather messy things, one of them being how poo is handled on NASA missions into space.  There are actual transcripts of an incident on the Apollo 10 flight where turds floated in the capsule.  

Yes there is an audio clip of this incident, it happened 133 hours into the flight.  You can actually get a full transcript of the mission in PDF format as well and the incidents are noted on pages 415 through 421 of the document.

Back in the early years of manned flight to space the crews on the Apollo missions used a bag that had flaps and a tab to pull the fecal mater into the bag.  The issue is that in this case the bag did not seal correctly and that meant floating fecal matter in the capsule.  Today the issue of waste management is a challenge but in this century a container that has a plastic bag with a fan in it is used to simulate gravity and pull the fecal matter in, for urination it's a tube with a fan as well.  Better but, not great.  In summation going to the bathroom in space is not as easy as one would think and in the case of Apollo 10 it led to the first poop flight in space.

Here are the links that I found that relate to this rather funny yet serious problem Apollo 10 faced.

Nasa transcript: Note you will have to go to page 415 to see the start of the incident. There is an audio feed you can also hear on YouTube.

IFL Science did an article about the errant turds, quite funny.

By the way here is the actual episode from The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.  It features the flying fecal matter but, the actual piece is on IBS in Space.  You will find the story near the end of the episode.