Artemis 2's space toilet doesn't deserve the bad press it's gotten over the past two weeks, according to mission commander Reid Wiseman.

Wiseman took some time to defend Artemis 2's lunar loo on Thursday (April 16), during a press conference at which the mission's four crewmates — fellow NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen — discussed their historic mission.

"I just want to say, 100% point blank: That was a wonderful toilet," Wiseman said. "The toilet worked great."

As you probably already know, there were some waste-disposal issues on Artemis 2, the first crewed mission to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. But, Wiseman stressed, the blame doesn't lie with the toilet itself, which is a more compact version of the loo that flies on the International Space Station.

"The toilet flushed just fine, but then when the liquid went out the bottom of the toilet, it got clogged up in our vent line," he said.

That vent line carried urine from the toilet to the hull of Artemis 2's Orion capsule, named "Integrity." From there it was expelled into space, creating quite a spectacle.

"I mean, that is an interesting thing to see out the window," Wiseman said. "It's just like a billion little tiny flecks of ice heading out into deep space."

But the clog limited this venting activity, which meant the space toilet was out of commission for parts of Artemis 2, which launched on April 1, flew around the moon on April 6 and returned to Earth on April 10. After all, the toilet's tank could hold "under 10 urination events," Wiseman estimated.

(Number twos were not vented into space, by the way; Integrity's space toilet was designed to hold solid waste until landing.)

So, what caused the vent line to clog? At first, NASA thought ice might have blocked the vent nozzle. But the problem remained even after the area was heated internally and Integrity was tilted to expose the nozzle to the sun. The current thinking therefore centers on a chemical reaction, possibly one involving chemicals introduced into the wastewater to prevent biofilms from growing in it.

NASA won't know for sure until teams have had a chance to examine Integrity in detail, which they are doing now. But whatever the root cause turns out to be, Wiseman thinks the toilet team should be proud.

"Those great engineers that made that toilet, I don't want them hanging their head low. They should hang it very high," he said. "It was a great piece of gear."

His enthusiasm for the toilet is not surprising, as the privy was a big step up from previous moon missions. The Apollo astronauts didn't have a toilet of any kind — just a lot of handheld bags.

Sorry, but we need to talk about Artemis 2's space toilet again.

The loo on Artemis 2's Orion capsule has gotten a lot of attention since the moon mission launched on April 1, and not just because it's the first privy ever to fly beyond Earth orbit. (NASA's Apollo astronauts did their business into handheld bags.)

The Artemis 2 toilet has also been acting up — specifically, backing up, as the four astronauts have had trouble venting its stored urine out into space. In addition, the Orion crew has reported an odd burning smell coming from the toilet, which remains unexplained but does not trouble Mission Control much.

On Tuesday (April 7), the day after Artemis 2's historic flyby of the moon, NASA officials gave us another update about the loo, which is a more compact version of the one on the International Space Station.

Based on that update, some of us may owe the space toilet a bit of an apology.

"The toilet remains operational," Artemis 2 Flight Director Rick Henfling said during a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.

"The challenge that we're working through is evacuating the tank," he added. "The vent is a lot less than we were expecting, and so we're having to fall back to some other alternate means, other than the toilet."

The mission team had hypothesized that ice may be blocking the vent nozzle on Orion's exterior, Henfling explained. But that doesn't seem to be the case; the problem persists, even after heaters were engaged and Orion was tilted toward the sun to "bake away" the proposed ice.

So what's actually going on?

"The latest theory is related to some of the chemistry that goes into ensuring that the wastewater doesn't develop any biofilms," Henfling said. "And there may be something going on with a chemical reaction where there's some debris that's generated as part of that reaction, and it's getting clogged in a filter."

That theory needs to be checked out, however. The mission team likely won't get any concrete answers until they can examine Orion up close, Henfling and others stressed.

"As soon as we get this [spacecraft] down on the ground, we'll be able to get inside, and we will get to the root of that," Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said during Tuesday's briefing.

They won't have to wait too long to conduct that examination. Orion and its four occupants — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen — will return to Earth on Friday evening (April 10), splashing down off the coast of San Diego.

Their homecoming will wrap up a historic mission, for both the toilet and humanity: Artemis 2 is the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.

HOUSTON — Talk about a looky loo.

As the four astronauts of NASA's Artemis 2 mission to the moon close in on their historic lunar flyby — the first by a human crew in more than 53 years — an unusual star has risen aboard their Orion moon ship. But it's not an astronaut — it's the space toilet.

That moon loo has been part of the Artemis 2 conversation since day one of the mission, when its urine function went offline and was fixed by mission specialist Christina Koch, with guidance from Mission Control.

"I'm proud to call myself the space plumber," Koch told reporters in a live video interview on Friday (April 3). "I like to say that it is probably the most important piece of equipment on board. So we were all breathing a sigh of relief when it turned out to be just fine."

But the toilet wasn't fine. Or at least, not 100% fine. In the days that followed, the astronauts reported an odd "burning smell" coming from Orion's hygiene bay" — essentially a small bathroom compartment about the size of a small jet's lavatory. The smell reminded the crew of the odor from an electrical heater being turned on for the first time in a long while.

Debbie Korth, Orion spacecraft deputy program manager, told reporters here on Saturday (April 4) that, while engineers are working to pinpoint the source of the smell, Mission Control isn't overly concerned about the issue.

"So we don't know exactly yet. We're still troubleshooting where they might be coming from," Korth said, referring to the odors.

Mission engineering teams, she added, "think it might be more mechanical in nature — some tapes and some other materials that might be off-gassing — but it's really early in that investigation. So, [I] don't think there's any hazardous condition."

Late Friday, the Artemis 2 crew also had problems venting urine overboard from the toilet's storage tank, which is about the size of an office wastebasket. It stopped after venting just 3% of its load, leading flight controllers to suspect a blockage from ice buildup — something that can easily happen in the cold of space.

So on Saturday, Orion turned to point its urine vent nozzle at the sun for hours in a "bake out" to warm it up, allow urine to be dumped overboard and let the crew start using the toilet to go "number one" again. (For now, they have to use a Contingency Collapsible Urinal device — a plastic container that can be emptied into Orion's tank — to collect their pee and dump it overboard.)

Korth said that the bake out was partially successful on Saturday, with Orion emptying out about half of its toilet tank. Still, the crew wasn't able to use the toilet to pee right away, something that Koch asked about late Saturday night in a radio call to Mission Control here at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

"One question back to you about, when do you expect we might be able to use toilet again?" Koch asked.

"The teams are talking about the signature and they are meeting to get you a forward plan as soon as possible," Artemis 2 CapCom (Capsule Communicator) Jacki Mahaffey radioed back from Mission Control, adding that the plan might come in an hour.

"I copy. Umm, would you authorize one use of the toilet?" Koch asked with a laugh. (Mahaffey said she would check.)

Meanwhile, on Earth, NASA astronaut Don Pettit shared photos of what the contingency urinal devices look like. They are cylindrical plastic containers with an open end to urinate into, with a cap to close it off. An outlet at its base allows it to be emptied into a tank. Each Artemis 2 astronaut has two of the devices.

"When you are in cislunar space with a broken toilet, you need contingencies, and the CCU replaces the need for about 25 pounds of diapers," Pettit wrote on social media.

The Orion toilet is a smaller, more compact version of the toilets used on the International Space Station. The hygiene bay containing it is a small compartment built into the floor of the Orion spacecraft. It cost $23 million to develop the toilet, as Space.com reported in 2020.

It may seem silly to focus so much on the Artemis 2 crew's toilet plumbing problems. Orion's four astronauts are flying to the moon, after all. But the space toilet has become a bit of a star, with reporters asking for updates every day during NASA's mission status briefings.

And that shouldn't be surprising, NASA officials said.

"I think space toilets, and bathrooms, is something everybody can really understand," Korth said of the apparent fixation on Orion's toilet tech. "And we're flying it for the first time. Apollo didn't have that kind of technology in the vehicle."

She has a point. Everybody pees and poops. And the Orion toilet allows astronauts to "go" like no one's gone before at the moon.

"I think the fixation on the toilet is kind of human nature, right?" John Honeycutt, who chairs the Artemis 2 Mission Management Team, told reporters here Saturday. "I mean, everybody knows how important that is to us here on Earth, and it's harder to manage in space … I'm interested in it, too."

NASA's Artemis 2 mission launched on April 1, sending its four-astronaut crew around the moon on a 10-day mission. In addition to Koch, the crew includes Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover (both of NASA, like Koch) and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency.

The Artemis 2 astronauts will make their closest approach to the moon in a flyby on Monday (April 6) and return to Earth to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast on Friday (April 10). You can get live updates on the flight from our Artemis 2 mission updates page.

HOUSTON — A burning smell from the toilet is not something you'd want to experience on Earth, so when it happened to NASA's Artemis 2 astronauts on the way to the moon — well, you can bet Mission Control was listening.

Late Friday (April 3), as NASA's Artemis 2 mission passed the halfway mark to the moon, the four astronauts on board reported a burning smell coming from their novel Orion space toilet.

"For me, it was some sort of burning odor, and then it was definitely in the hygiene bay," said Artemis 2 mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. "And when I opened up the hygiene bay, the rest of the crew could smell it pretty much immediately." (You can see our latest updates on our Artemis 2 mission updates page.)

NASA astronaut Christina Koch, also an Artemis 2 mission specialist, told Mission Control that the smell seemed to originate from the toilet, and was similar to an odor the crew smelled on the first day of the mission.

Koch described it as "the kind of burning heater smell," something that Hansen also confirmed.

Hansen said he and the crew had been warned before flight of the potential for an odor similar to "when you turn on a heater that's been sitting for a while and … you smell that burnt smell that comes from that," he said. "And I do think it smells similar to that."

Mission Control initially suspected the odor could be caused by orange insulation around the door to the hygiene bay containing Orion's toilet, but did say the astronauts could keep using the bathroom as usual.

"Overall, we don't have any major concerns," Mission Control radioed the crew.

The Artemis 2 crew had a bit of trouble with their toilet on day one of their mission, when Koch worked with Mission Control to restore it quickly to service.

The astronauts were advised overnight to use their contingency bags to collect urine if they had to pee, rather than the toilet. But that was due to an issue with the primary vent on Orion that dumps wastewater overboard, which may have built up ice around it. Mission Control was working on ways to heat the nozzle up with sunlight and heaters to clear any ice today.

The four Artemis 2 astronauts — NASA commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover round out the crew — woke up today at 12:35 p.m. EDT (1635 GMT) for Flight Day 4 of their 10-day mission to the moon to the tune of "Pink Pony Club" by Chappell Roan, which Mission Control played as a wakeup call but cut off before the chorus.

"We were all eagerly awaiting the chorus," Wiseman said.

NASA shared some stunning new images of Wiseman and Koch gazing at Earth from Orion's windows as they continued leaving their home planet behind.

The astronauts are spending today brushing up on lunar geography to prepare for the moon observations they will make on Monday (April 6) when they make their closest approach to the moon. The crew will fly by the moon, coming within just over 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) of the lunar surface before swinging back toward the Earth.

All four of the astronauts will also get to manually fly Orion today, NASA officials said.

Mission Control called off a planned maneuver today to refine Orion's course toward the moon, apparently because it's still on such a precise flight path. As of press time, Orion was about 107,922 miles (173,683 km) from the moon and closing, and about 172,217 miles (277,156 km) from Earth.

Artemis 2 is NASA's first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft (the crew named theirs "Integrity"), and its flawless launch on April 1 was the first crewed flight of NASA's Space Launch System megarocket.

The flight is NASA's first astronaut mission to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the vanguard flight for the agency's plans to return humans to the lunar surface by 2028 and set up a permanent moon base by 2032.

Luckily for the Artemis 2 astronauts, space-toilet technology has advanced a bit in the past half century.

The Artemis 2 mission, which is currently targeting an April 1 liftoff, will send four people on a 10-day trip around the moon in NASA's Orion capsule. It will be the first crewed flight to lunar realms since the Apollo 17 mission back in December 1972.

The Apollo astronauts did their business in the open, peeing into a roll-on cuff and pooping into plastic bags in the presence of their crewmates. But the Artemis 2 spaceflyers — NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will have access to a bona fide bathroom.

"We're pretty fortunate as a crew to have a toilet with a door on this tiny spacecraft," Hansen said in a video explainer about Orion's bathroom that was posted on YouTube last October.

It's "the one place that we can go during the mission where we can actually feel like we're alone for a moment," he added.

This sanctuary is not very spacious; it's about the size of a lavatory on a small passenger jet, according to Lockheed Martin, which built Orion for NASA. But even that amount of room is impressive, given that the capsule has just 330 cubic feet (9.34 cubic meters) of habitable volume — roughly the same as two minivans — and it has to accommodate four people for a week and a half. (The Apollo crew module was even smaller at 210 cubic feet, or 5.95 cubic m, but only three astronauts flew aboard it at a time.)

The door to Orion's lavatory is on the capsule's floor. This orientation may seem odd on Earth, but it won't appear so in the microgravity environment of space.

"You would float over to it, open up this hinging door and float on in," Hansen said.

The bathroom — or "hygiene bay," as NASA calls it — also features privacy curtains, which Artemis 2 astronauts may or may not use during the mission.

"If there's more space needed, they can leave the door open and put up a privacy curtain," Debbie Korth, deputy Orion Program manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, told reporters during a press conference in September 2025.

Once they're inside the hygiene bay, the Artemis 2 astronauts will have more to work with than just some bags and a condom-like cuff. (The Apollo astronauts were all men, remember, so designers didn't have to come up with waste-disposal solutions that worked for both sexes.) Indeed, Orion's toilet is very similar to the one that astronauts use on the U.S. segment of the International Space Station (ISS) — a device known as the Universal Waste Management System (UWMS).

The UWMS features a seat atop a canister, with a long, flexible urine hose attached. Each Artemis 2 astronaut will have his or her own funnel for that hose, to keep things as sanitary as possible. Urine will go down the hose, with air flow doing the shepherding work rather than gravity.

The UWMS on the ISS recycles urine, turning it into water that crewmembers can use. But Artemis 2 is a short mission, so its toilet doesn't need to do that; rather, the astronauts' urine will be vented into space several times per day.

The story is a bit different for solid waste.

"The feces get sucked down into the bottom, into a bag. You close that off, and you squish it down into the bottom, into the canister," Hansen said in the video. "During the mission, we'll have to change out that solid waste canister a few times, and all of that comes back to Earth with us."

Artemis 2 will be the spaceflight debut for the Orion hygiene bay: The equipment did not fly on Artemis 1, which successfully sent an uncrewed Orion to lunar orbit and back in late 2022. NASA has thought about what the astronauts can do if the equipment doesn't work as planned, and the solution is a blast from the past — basically, going back to Apollo-era toilet tech.

"We're actually flying contingency equipment — you know, urine collection bags — and they can still use the toilet for other functions, even without it functioning, to be able to dump the urine overboard," Korth said.

Staying clean in space is a challenge, something that Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti knows well after spending several months on the International Space Station (ISS).

In two videos, Cristoforetti showed off the shower aboard the station, a spot that she called the "hygiene corner," as well as one of the two toilets.

She cited several challenges to keeping clean in space, including the lack of space, limited water and the effects of microgravity. [The Scoop on Space Poop: How Astronauts Go Potty]

"This is the place where I wash, brush my teeth or, after workouts, take a shower ISS-style," Cristoforetti said in a video produced by the European Space Agency.

To stay clean, most astronauts request a Russian-made toiletry pouch among their personal items. The pouch includes toothpaste, a toothbrush and deodorant — enough to last six months, the typical stay aboard the station. Each astronaut is also assigned two towels (one large and one small) every week, and a smaller wet towel every two days.

Working with limited water

As water is limited, the astronauts fill a pouch at a nearby water station to the temperature they like, Cristoforetti said. There are two main methods to clean oneself. One is to drape water on the body part you'd like to wash, and the other is to use a towel. The astronaut said the first method is more enjoyable, but takes more time to accomplish.

As for brushing one's teeth, there is the problem of figuring out what to do with the toothpaste at the end, since there is no sink on board. Some astronauts swallow (the toothpaste sent up there is designed for that), but Cristoforetti takes the other option.

"I really don't like to do that, so I spit it out," she said. "It's not the most elegant thing, but you have to do what you have to do."

Cristoforetti also demonstrated how to wash hair. She squirted a bit of rinseless shampoo into her hair, lathered up and then dried with a towel.

Waste management

With six people on board the station, working toilet facilities are essential to prevent a big mess from happening. Whether you are about to do "number one" or "number two," Cristoforetti said in a separate video, the principle to stay clean relies on suction.

For urine, the astronauts use a large hose with a cup at the end. The urine gets put into a purification system that eventually turns it into drinking water.

As for defecation, a solid-waste container pairs with the toilet Cristoforetti showed; it is changed every 10 days or so, assuming three crewmembers are using it. There is a "seat" available on it, but as people float in microgravity, most astronauts prefer to lift the seat and use the opening underneath.

"When we are done with our business, we close the bag and we push it down into the solid-waste container, and of course, as a courtesy to the next person, we put a new bag inside," Cristoforetti said.

While Cristoforetti did not mention it on camera, once a solid-waste container is filled, it is put aside as trash. Generally, the solid waste is then placed in a Russian Progress cargo spacecraft to burn up naturally in the Earth's atmosphere when the spacecraft leaves the station.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Journalist, producer and television host Soledad O'Brien will host the National Geographic Channel's television event "Live from Space," Nat Geo representatives announced Wednesday (Feb. 19). O'Brien will broadcast live from NASA's Mission Control in Houston to give viewers a glimpse of astronaut life and work aboard the International Space Station.

"Live from Space" is set to air live on Friday, Mar. 14 at 8 p.m. ET (7 p.m. CT) on the National Geographic Channel, as well as in 170 other countries. The two-hour show will follow NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata on the space station. The astronauts will take viewers on a guided tour of the space lab, demonstrating how they sleep upside down, stay fit, maintain personal hygiene and use the toilet in zero gravity.

"For those that were thrilled by 'Gravity,' I think they’ll be even more impressed by the incredible work being done every day aboard the ISS [International Space Station] and the tremendous risks and sacrifices the astronauts undertake," O'Brien said in a statement. Viewers will see Earth's sunrise and sunset, city lights, auroras, lightning storms and shooting stars. "We will get to witness the greatest show beyond Earth," O'Brien said. [See amazing photos taken by Koichi Wakata]

O'Brien is an Emmy-winning journalist who has reported from around the world for NBC News, MSNBC, CNN, Al Jazeera America and HBO. Astronaut Mike Massimino, known for fixing the Hubble Telescope, will accompany O'Brien on the show in Houston.