Toilets in Space

A bit of Flushable History

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re tracking the number of toilets in space (again)! While some might think it’s a waste of time to track such a crappy stat, it brings the team’s inner 12 year olds joy. 

It’s also an indicator of just how far human spaceflight has come – and how different cultures deal with human waste. 

On April 12th 1961, Yuri Gargarin went around the Earth in style with a fully-functioning waste disposal system. Not even a month later, Alan Shepard was forced to wet himself simply because the powers that be didn’t think he’d be in a spaceship for hours on end.  

It didn’t get better from there for the Americans. While Soviets had the relative comfort of essentially touch-free waste disposal, the Americans went to the Moon with awkward, low-tech bathroom solutions. Like sticking a bag to their rear end, with the occasional turd escaping and floating around the spacecraft. Americans didn’t get proper sanitation solutions until Skylab – 12 years after the Soviets – and that was only while the crew was onboard the station, not for the hours-long commute.

Now that you know the brief history of space toilets, on to the present: the current bathroom situation in space.

If you ever need to tally the number of toilets in space, urine luck as it’s a fairly simple formula:

Number of toilets on International Space Station plus number of toilets on Chinese Space Station plus number of crewed spacecraft above the Karman line. As of writing this article, that’s 4 on the ISS, 2 on the Tiangong, 1 on Crew Dragon Endurance, 1 on Soyuz MS-24, and 1 on Shenzhou 17 for a total of 9.

An important thing to note: the number of toilets in space isn’t the functional number of toilets in space. So if nature is calling, you need to be careful which toilet you head to.

While the Crew Dragons are docked to the ISS, their toilet is inaccessible. And it’s not much better on the Soyuz craft – although technically accessible, their facilities are typically only used when the Soyuz is not docked to the ISS. (We assume the same applies to the Shenzhou craft, since their design was derived from the Soyuz.)

So if all of the docked craft aren’t an option when it’s time for a bio break, surely any available toilet on one of the space stations is free to use. Right?

Well, it depends. 

If you’re a taikonaut on the Chinese Space Station, as far as we know the answer is yes, you can use whichever of the two toilets are available.

But if you’re an astronaut or cosmonaut on the International Space Station… emptying your tank can get a little tricky. 

If you’re Russian, you have two toilets available for you to use: one in the Zvezda module and one in the Nauka module.

And if you’re American, you technically also have access to two toilets – but only one of them is actually usable. The newest toilet installed on the ISS, the Universal Waste Management System, is considered an experiment and was only used for 16 days before being forced into dormancy by a pressure sensor fault. Which means that Americans are left with a single high-tech porcelain throne: the Waste and Hygiene Compartment, where all the controls are labeled in Russian. Good luck, anglophones.