In Space, No One Can Hear You Flush

Beautiful view of the constellation Urion: pic.twitter.com/dmQ0TT7aeD

— NTodd - Antifa IT Support 🇺🇦🐸 (@ntoddpax) April 5, 2026

Peepee¹ in spaaaaace!  As for the naming convention, that's courtesy of Jolly Wally:

Tom and I snapped color photographs of the molecular cloud...I had them on the table during an astronomy debriefing, mixed with other celestial photos. Dr. Gill noticed one and asked, "Wally, what constellation is this?'

"Jocelyn,", I replied, "that's the constellation Urion."

— NTodd - Antifa IT Support 🇺🇦🐸 (@ntoddpax) April 4, 2026

Anyway, nobody needs to be mean to the heavenly potty: 

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."

I would hate the idea of needing to keep track of how many "urination events" had occurred, but it's still way better than what they had on Apollo, as illustrated by the Recommendations to Improve Crew Health and Performance for Future Exploration Missions and Lunar Surface Operations report:

Issue: Waste Management

Description: a) Requires approximately 45 minutes from start to end in case there are any problems b) Fecal cannister would be helpful

Comments: BM Log: For defecation the crew had to strip the underwear off, requiring the biomed sensors to be removed...  

Questions: Fecal bag recommendation : Calibrations of "crew member anus with respect to the front of the sticky part"?  

The bottom line, as it were: "Crew preferred to strip naked to move bowels." 

In conclusion: I'll never forget my old dad when these things would happen to him...the things he'd say to me.

1 - I was a bit cornfused about the potty situ at the time, but it really was urine, as the above article discusses.  It was all a matter of liquid waste volume/available capacity.