How do astronauts pee in zero gravity?
it’s an interesting question and I think that it’s answer isn’t know by a very large number of people.
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17 Answers
Yah, in a bag. It’s not all subject to gravity. Muscles do a lot of the work.
NASA provides details.
Muscles will expel the urine. Then you have the fact that water has a tensile strength, so it can be pulled along by preceding and following molecules. As long as there’s some force behind something, it can be moved in space, and it won’t change direction until either momentum is lost entirely or something else serves a force to redirect the object.
Isn’t there some kind of suction involved? Or is that an urban legend of sorts?
The issue isn’t getting it out, it’s the tendency for the liquid, once out of the body, to form a sphere and go floating about. A bag as @robmandu mentioned might work, or a vacuum toilet, which is what I have heard of.
Now that you’ve added the link, @robmandu, it seems that we’re both right.
Thank goodness for the vacuum toilet! Because I wouldn’t want to think of how #2 would otherwise be handled. I mean, a bag, ewww!, that just wouldn’t work, really…
Someone asked a few months ago, “What is the greatest invention?” and I said the flush toilet. I feel oddly vindicated.
As a guy, the idea of a vacuum toilet makes my Johnson shrink back like a frightened turtle!
Yeah, having to use a vacuum toilet would totally suck. Ba dum tsh.
But as for the free-floating pee problem, that should be easy to solve, I think. Pee is forcefully expelled from the bladder, so you just need to keep it in one place after it’s out. I’d think of a disposable potty with some sort of absorbent cloth inside that soaks up all the urine. In other words, a sponge in a bottle.
By the way, this question made me wonder whether peeing while upside down would be very different from peeing downside down. But I don’t feel particularly enthusiastic to give it a try.
Just keep your mouth shut if/when you do it.
Oh, and corks in your nose.
Tell your comrades that you just spilled some lemonade and you need their help “cleaning it up”.
And everyone gets a straw!
do they wash their hands after?
in space, no one can hear you stream
Just last night I watched the Discovery Channel (I think) program that deals with this issue. There are tubes that have personal attachments for each astronaut (different for male and female anatomy).
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