Space Toilet: A Giant Flush for Womankind

Friday night, while you were watching Donald Trump’s helicopter touch down at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, an Antares rocket lifted off from Wallops Island carrying a $23 million titanium toilet to the International Space Station. The new low-gravity space potty, known as the Universal Waste Management System (UWMS), sports a smaller footprint and improved efficiency, and is equally adapted to the needs of male and female astronauts. As NASA astronauts say, “you go, girl!”

More:

“Finally, a Space Toilet for Ladies,” Amanda Arnold, The Cut

“NASA’s new $30M space toilet is smaller, better smelling and more female-friendly,” CBC Radio

“State-of-the-art space toilet successfully launched into space,” Mark Kaufman, Mashable

“Antares rocket launches new astronaut toilet and more to space station for NASA,” Chelsea Gohd, Space.com

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Image by Mike Licht. Flush Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.

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Plumbing Boom in DC

The U.S. General Services Administration tested a prototype nuclear composting toilet in the GSA regional headquarters lady’s room on Monday. Unfortunately, the maiden voyage did not go as planned, and two brave test pilots were injured.

Details:

Joe The Plumber, Congressman?

Ohio’s Joe the Plumber may challenge Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D, OH-9) in the 2012 election. You may remember him. His name isn’t really Joe, and he isn’t really a plumber, but he became famous in 2008 for asking presidential candidate Barack Obama questions about a tax bracket actually much higher than his own. Since then, Samuel Joseph “Joe” Wurzelbacher campaigned for failed presidential candidate John McCain and failed as both author and Internet foreign correspondent.

Joe’s book, like his biography and politics, is fiction. His political aspirations, however, are real — his greatest accomplishment to date is his recent election as one of only 400 Republican Party committee members in Ohio’s Lucas County (37,258 registered Republicans).

Plumbing the Mysteries of Space

To boldly go where no man has gone before …. Manned space flight presents a unique set of challenges. When you go to into space, sooner or later you have to … well, go. The International Space Station has presented a unique challenge to waste-removal engineers: the zero-gravity toilet.

Another Triumph in Space

In the vast human adventure that is the U.S. manned space program, NASA engineers fixed the broken toilet in the International Space Station yesterday, just in time to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first walk on the lunar surface.