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Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business


If humans are to return to the moon, space agencies and governments need to figure out the legal, ethical, and practical dimensions of extraterrestrial waste management.

But in micro- or lunar gravity, waste does not disconnect from the body so easily, and it can behave unpredictably in storage, inspiring memorable phrases such as “fecal popcorning,” referring to the movements of astro-poop as it bounces off the sides of space toilet containment tanks. At the dawn of the Space Age, American crews literally just taped a bag on their butts when they had to go, a system that infamously resulted in escaped turds floating through the Apollo 10 command module, and astronaut Frank Borman’s decision to simply not poop for more than a week on Gemini 7 to avoid the attendant indignities. This is an exceedingly improbable outcome, given the inhospitable nature of the moon, but because it is a possibility, Mark Lupisella, an exploration integration manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has proposed a robotic mission to procure samples from the poo bags at one of the Apollo landing sites.

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