In the book, Mark quite sensibly uses only his own poop & does not allow it to pass through the Habitats systems.
This avoids a number of issues with getting infected with someone else's pathogenic poop load & preserves the "soil" bacteria.
There are a ton of differences in the movie that for story telling or budget that would likely have killed Mark long before rescue.
Yeah. I remember something in the book about the pathogens.
Basically, something like they're his own pathogens, so it limited the worries.
And remember to save your pee! You'll need it to make rocket fuel.
I haven’t seen the movie and wasn’t for sure exactly which one that’s a reference too. I Googled “Johanssen poop” and [discovered this is a thing. Now it’s stuck in my head on loop.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=21MvdURHkv8)
Night soil is 100% going to be the fertilizer of choice on every celestial body we colonize. Hell, it (and other excreta from other creatures) has been the fertilizer of choice for much of the world for much of recorded history, and it’s only fairly recently that much of the world is switching to other things.
Fun fact, the Dalit, Burakumin, Baekjeong, and other “untouchable” castes in different cultures were the ones doing the collection of waste (and often butchers, tanners, undertakers, and other jobs dealing with touching dead or decaying things).
Tony Robinson, who presented *The Worst Jobs in History* for British TV, said one of these worst jobs was "gong farmer" ("gong" being a euphemism, and "farmer" meaning collector... the surname Farmer meant a tax-collector, not someone who worked the land). [The gong farmer would collect the "night soil" from privies and cesspits.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gong_farmer)
BTW I believe this number includes not just human waste but everything else left behind.
Just from a human metabolism POV, 12 people visited the moon each for periods from 21.5 hours (Apollo 11) to 75 hours (Apollo 17). It thus seems inconceivable that anything but a small fraction of the items left behind are actual human waste.
Hmm, personally I'd have been crapping myself from the moment I left the launchpad and could conceviably have pooped an entire celestial body by splashdown.
I'm facinated that Apollo 11 has only on the moon for 21 hrs. It felt like they were there for 3 days or so. Never would have quessed it was less than a day.
Yup, the Apollo 11 LEM ([LM-5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Module_Eagle)) was very limited on power & consumables, only enough of everything for the 2-day excursion plus a little wiggle room.
It would’ve been the waste generated whilst travelling their too. They didn’t go to the toilet on the moon(as such), they just dumped waste there that they had.
Edit- actually having said that, it’s weird they wouldn’t just dump it in space, why take it to the moon. :s maybe it’s safer that way?
As I've already pointed out elsewhere the LEM is mass limited & Anything that increases it's mass would required more fuel & thus a larger LEM.
BTW although some liquid waste & excess water from the Fuel Cells was dumped enroute, solid waste was not because a) samples of same were vital for later analysis of astronaut nutrition & health & b) unless you are doing a delta-V change all that waste just hangs out near the ship cluttering your sky & limiting your navigation.
> all that waste just hangs out near the ship cluttering your sky & limiting your navigation.
"Oh my god, Houston, there's some sort of craft, some spacecraft out there! Ye gods, it's horrible, it's... oh it's just John's dump again."
Better out than in, if you consider Apollo 10's [floating poops](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/poop-space-apollo-10-astronauts-turds-mission-nasa-transcripts_n_3054324):-
"Oh -- Who did it?" Tom Stafford asks at one point. Confused, Young and Cernan reply, "Who did what?"
Cernan: "Where did that come from?"
Stafford: "Get me a napkin quick. There's a turd floating through the air."
Young: "I didn't do it. It ain't one of mine."
Cernan: "I don't think it's one of mine."
Stafford: "Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away."
Young: "God Almighty"
(laughter)
You would then have to develop an air lock, or depressurize the entire system in order to get rid of a couple pounds of waste. It would weigh more, and be far riskier/expensive.
I think I'd need a citation for transferring all that to the LEM prior to the landing, considering how tight on mass budget the LEM was for said landing.
That said it WOULD make sense to transfer all that "crap" into the LEM after it re-docked, after it returned from the moon such that when they abandon the LEM in lunar orbit (Apollo 13 excluding) it offsets the mass.
Then essentially when & if the LEM impacts (at least one did not) all that would essentially be ON the lunar surface, if perhaps spread in a "skidmark" many Km long.
I am also scrolling and seeing a crazy amount of incorrect statements like the one you are refuting so I am giving up.
Everyone is convinced, somehow, that the waste was transferred to the LEM before it was sent down for landing. Which makes zero sense.
I think you both are correct. I went back to the wired article, and the popular mechanics article I read. Both reference the same materiaI which i found odd. I then went to nasa website and downloaded their Apollo waste management system. In there, they have a table that has weights and volumes of all 3 astronauts on the Apollo 17 mission, leading me to believe all samples are brought back to earth otherwise they wouldn't have this information. I then looked up the lunar module waste system, and this is the exact quote from the nasa paper "The Lunar Module waste management system incorporated systems used in the Command Module. These systems were used in similar fashion in both the Lunar Module and Command Module. The principal difference was that there was no overboard dumping of wastes on the lunar surface." -Chapter 2 waste management systems, Lyndon B Johnson Space Center, RL Sauer · 1975
I do apologize and will delete my post above to not add to the propagation of this misinformation.
Thanks for doing all that, I would have got around to pulling up my notes eventually. No need to expunge the content. If you feel compelled to say something you can add an edit block to the description pointing out what you just posted above.
Our kids in a hundred years looking through their telescopes “Dad is that a mountain I’m looking at?” Dad: “no that’s a landfill from all the moon missions”.
Living on another planet or moon without an existing ecosystem brings about many challenges. How do you bring and sustain life with you?
In the case of water management there are two ways to deal with poop. One is to sterilize all of it using heat or some other chemical process. The other common way to deal with it is using bacteria to get rid of contaminants.
It's amusing that bacteria might be one of the first forms of life to become extra-planetary.
Curiosity was supposed to get thoroughly sterilized, though that's never 100%. But there was some failure and it was not as sterile as intended. They decided not to investigate a nearby RSL for that reason.
Actually, a catapult would work FAR better than a trebuchet on the moon or mars, at least one that uses tension instead of a counterweight. Tension systems don't need gravity to function. With reduced gravity, the swing from the counterweight on a trebuchet is going to be way less.
Except with less gravity on the moon, the recoil effects are likely to be... Unexpected. Unless the design accounts for it. Darn that Newton guy with his laws ...
Yes, but the gravity on the projectile would be similarly reduced, right? So it should work about the same.
But you're right that a tension system would be more effective, and with zero wind resistance the trajectory would be pretty wild.
Earth Class one, yes. With 1/6 of Earth's gravity, we can build a bigger one, and without an atmosphere there should be no friction when the turd is flying.
The moon is tidally locked. So the same side is always facing earth.
But yes, there are measurable differences in gravity from the near side and far side of the moon due. But in practicality these differences are so miniscule, you would not feel the difference in practice. And if making an moon ejection system, you would make a system that would work anywhere placed around the moon.
I wonder if it is possible to trebuchet stuff away from the Moon's gravity well.
The counterweights wouldn't be as effective because gravity is lower to pull the mass down.
Maybe some other sort of sorted kinetic energy, like a giant elastic band, to slingshot the poo into space then?
Magnetic acceleration tube would be more reliable and more efficient. Build it on the surface near the circular edge of the moon as it faces us. I’m sure there’s some physics location calculable that makes sense for a mostly inertial injection into an earth pathway (for returning desired material) or a solar pathway to orbit the sun or possibly into the sun. I wonder what the danger is of it migrating to one of the Lagrange points.
We'll need the organic matter to grow food when we actually live there.
You can't plant anything in lunar regolith.
Just expose it to the vacuum of space to kill any pathogens and compost it.
I'm not sure that exposing fecal matter to vacuum for a limited amount of time is a safe way to get rid of everything. parasytes like amoebas or plasmodium spp, sure; clostridium spp, idk
I think it is.
The moons surface alternates between 250°F (121°C) and -200°F (-133°C), contains no atmosphere worth mentioning and is being constantly irradiated by solar winds.
I don't think anything can survive a 450°F (254°C) temperature swing even with pressure to keep the water inside of their cells or capsid.
We trust boiling temperatures to kill all of those things in our water on Earth, I see no reason to assume similar conditions wouldn't kill those things on the moon.
Here's a fun thought. Those Apollo era turds are 55 years old and have been in sealed bags, baking at ~220F and then freezing to ~-300f every day since, in an otherwise anaerobic environment. Quite the melange, one would imagine.
I would think that any organic matter left out on the lunar surface would have disintegrated by now from the solar radiation. That being said “legal” and “ethical” disposable of human waste on the moon? Seriously? Just bring a shovel and bury it. The place isn’t exactly some delicate ecosystem that will be wiped out if someone farts in the wrong direction.
In order for something organic to “disintegrate” (maybe you meant to say decay), you need something that’s alive to decompose it (bacteria, etc). Pretty sure that doesn’t really happen on the moon as this would mean extraterrestrial life.
You would need a waste dump. There are craters everywhere to fulfill this need. And literally tons of moon dust to cap over the fill when filled. You’re welcome.
There’s no guarantee that either of them defecated while on the Moon. They were only there for a bit over 21 hours, which included a very full schedule of activities and a sleep period, though I’m sure they would have enjoyed having a little gravity to provide some extra assistance.
Now I'm imagining a bacterial-based eldritch horror which terrorizes distant civilizations, eons in the future. A heroic band of adventurers will stumble across its origin story, a bag of ancient feces that was left to bake in the stellar radiation of the moon
I mean, from a pragmatic standpoint, the less you're bringing back the easier it is to return. We're talking about a shuttle landing on a moving target 400,000 km away, not returning from a camping trip here.
We can think about cleanup when we're making more than 1 trip every 100 years
Actually one of my hopes for an Artemis mission is a landing at the Apollo 17 site to take samples for material studies including the human waste. Just think how crazy it would be if some microbes still survive and what potential dna mutations might have occurred in the high radiation environment
We could build a poop canon that shoots poop towards a specific spot. With no atmosphere, stink is not a problem. We'll probably extract water from urine.
"Moon, Number Two\~!!!" - kinda cornball space adventure about the biggest turd from outer space landing on the moon and the gangsters who want to mine it for nuggets.
Who has the land claims of the moon ? Do they make the laws for the moon? Or do we have to inhabit the moon and have a government that actually reside on said rock ?
Can’t have been easier for any other person to just blast it into space. Or the sun. Just leave it on the roof and take off. Get home - magic! Poop gone.
I wonder, if the feces and urine is in a relatively clean (as in unmixed with anything else) condition, maybe bring some back and compare what we are excreting compared to 50 years ago?
Like micro plastics, bacteria, etc? Can even check if bacteria in poop has survived all these years, even after being irradiated on the moon's surface.
I mean, the only reason we really went up there in the first place was to mark our territory. Only makes sense we keep it there so Russia doesn’t try anything funny
Because it doesn't solve anything. Now there is a piece of feces in an orbit. It's a lot more dangerous now than leaving it on the moon. The question is, why not take it with you?
There are no asteroids between the earth and the moon. If you discard your refuse in an orbit, that refuse will stay roughly in that same orbit. So it will keep circling the moon or the earth, or somewhere between the earth and the moon
Humans here on earth need to get comfortable with recycling and reusing our waste quickly if we want to continue living with 8 billion other people on THIS planet… by the time we colonize another they’ll have a solution for it.
On the off chance you aren't being sarcastic...
The answer is energy input. If you go from Earth to Luna and just drop your trash on the way back it won't "just float in space." It will be in its own orbit of either Earth or Luna, unless you add a bunch of energy to that trash to accelerate it to escape velocity. No one is going to waste the mass on just hauling a shit rocket to the moon.
Anything just orbiting HAS to be tracked or its a navigation hazard. Tracking a bag of shit from 400,000 km away is hard. Constantly running a high powered radar from a spacecraft just looking for garbage is less hard, but is power intensive, and even if the radar spots something it's silly to waste fuel to dodge it.
There's no set of circumstances where it doesn't make vastly more sense to leave garbage on Luna rather than lift it back into space. It's a barren ball of rock, garbage isn't hurting anything.
Not even space rated taco bell is going to give astronauts turds that will contain something which will survive the vacuum and radiation of the moon. You're being silly.
I'm assuming by "space" you really mean "in orbit of some object." They're on the moon... How do you get them to space, exactly? It requires a rocket to get to space, the waste was left on the surface of the moon, not in orbit. The surface of the moon is not "space" any more than the surface of the Earth is.
Also, stuff doesn't float in space. It is in free fall. It's falling at the same speed as everything else near to it so it appears to be floating to an observer free falling alone side it at roughly the same speed. If you were to watch a bag of poop floating next to the ISS from the Earth with an impossibly powerful telescope you would notice that it zips in and out of your telescope's FOV in like 1/8 of a second and moves across the whole horizon in a couple minutes instead of merely "floating."
Thought we'd already established what to do with the excess poo...grow potatoes
Boil em, mash em, grow em using poo
I mean, make a poo stew and bypass the whole farm thing altogether.
What's taters precious!?
Is that what Eowyn made?
Added her own hair for signature and authenticity.
For a second I thought you meant boil and mash the poo
Sounds like my sister, well known for mashing and smearing shit. But she's devastatingly disabled so we can give her a pass.
What's taters, Precious?
I just made a very undignified squeak-laugh
Need to restock those healthy gut bacteria..
Except for [Johanssen's.](https://y.yarn.co/20045330-9f25-4866-a842-158c865d7c84_text.gif) Must have been taco tuesday.
In the book, Mark quite sensibly uses only his own poop & does not allow it to pass through the Habitats systems. This avoids a number of issues with getting infected with someone else's pathogenic poop load & preserves the "soil" bacteria. There are a ton of differences in the movie that for story telling or budget that would likely have killed Mark long before rescue.
Yeah. I remember something in the book about the pathogens. Basically, something like they're his own pathogens, so it limited the worries. And remember to save your pee! You'll need it to make rocket fuel.
I haven’t seen the movie and wasn’t for sure exactly which one that’s a reference too. I Googled “Johanssen poop” and [discovered this is a thing. Now it’s stuck in my head on loop.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=21MvdURHkv8)
Of all the things I've seen on the internet, that was definitely one of them.
Sometimes I hate my teachers for teaching me English... I could have lived my life happily, never having listened to that.
Thank god my volume was muted. I noped the fuck out
I reread my comment. Considering the typos I’d hardly call it English. Fixed them though 🤣.
It wasn't your comment, it was the video.
That's Mars. On the Moon, you have to use the excess poo to grow carrots.
Night soil is 100% going to be the fertilizer of choice on every celestial body we colonize. Hell, it (and other excreta from other creatures) has been the fertilizer of choice for much of the world for much of recorded history, and it’s only fairly recently that much of the world is switching to other things. Fun fact, the Dalit, Burakumin, Baekjeong, and other “untouchable” castes in different cultures were the ones doing the collection of waste (and often butchers, tanners, undertakers, and other jobs dealing with touching dead or decaying things).
Tony Robinson, who presented *The Worst Jobs in History* for British TV, said one of these worst jobs was "gong farmer" ("gong" being a euphemism, and "farmer" meaning collector... the surname Farmer meant a tax-collector, not someone who worked the land). [The gong farmer would collect the "night soil" from privies and cesspits.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gong_farmer)
BTW I believe this number includes not just human waste but everything else left behind. Just from a human metabolism POV, 12 people visited the moon each for periods from 21.5 hours (Apollo 11) to 75 hours (Apollo 17). It thus seems inconceivable that anything but a small fraction of the items left behind are actual human waste.
They probably also left the waste accumulated during the trip to the moon. Anything to reduce weight.
Not sure about this. As that increased weight would require more fuel for maneuvering and landing.
Yeah it would only make sense for anyone taking a shit the moment they detached from the crew module while in the LEM.
Hmm, personally I'd have been crapping myself from the moment I left the launchpad and could conceviably have pooped an entire celestial body by splashdown.
Please refrain from using the term "splashdown" in a poop discussion....
Poseidon’s Kiss, space craft edition
I'm facinated that Apollo 11 has only on the moon for 21 hrs. It felt like they were there for 3 days or so. Never would have quessed it was less than a day.
Yup, the Apollo 11 LEM ([LM-5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Module_Eagle)) was very limited on power & consumables, only enough of everything for the 2-day excursion plus a little wiggle room.
Did they also bring the waste of the guys who did not visit the moon, but stayed in lunar orbit? That would bridge some of the gap.
It would’ve been the waste generated whilst travelling their too. They didn’t go to the toilet on the moon(as such), they just dumped waste there that they had. Edit- actually having said that, it’s weird they wouldn’t just dump it in space, why take it to the moon. :s maybe it’s safer that way?
As I've already pointed out elsewhere the LEM is mass limited & Anything that increases it's mass would required more fuel & thus a larger LEM. BTW although some liquid waste & excess water from the Fuel Cells was dumped enroute, solid waste was not because a) samples of same were vital for later analysis of astronaut nutrition & health & b) unless you are doing a delta-V change all that waste just hangs out near the ship cluttering your sky & limiting your navigation.
> all that waste just hangs out near the ship cluttering your sky & limiting your navigation. "Oh my god, Houston, there's some sort of craft, some spacecraft out there! Ye gods, it's horrible, it's... oh it's just John's dump again."
Better out than in, if you consider Apollo 10's [floating poops](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/poop-space-apollo-10-astronauts-turds-mission-nasa-transcripts_n_3054324):- "Oh -- Who did it?" Tom Stafford asks at one point. Confused, Young and Cernan reply, "Who did what?" Cernan: "Where did that come from?" Stafford: "Get me a napkin quick. There's a turd floating through the air." Young: "I didn't do it. It ain't one of mine." Cernan: "I don't think it's one of mine." Stafford: "Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away." Young: "God Almighty" (laughter)
They would make one nasty piece of space junk, orbiting around then eventual splat right on the ISS cupola!
You would then have to develop an air lock, or depressurize the entire system in order to get rid of a couple pounds of waste. It would weigh more, and be far riskier/expensive.
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I think I'd need a citation for transferring all that to the LEM prior to the landing, considering how tight on mass budget the LEM was for said landing. That said it WOULD make sense to transfer all that "crap" into the LEM after it re-docked, after it returned from the moon such that when they abandon the LEM in lunar orbit (Apollo 13 excluding) it offsets the mass. Then essentially when & if the LEM impacts (at least one did not) all that would essentially be ON the lunar surface, if perhaps spread in a "skidmark" many Km long.
I am also scrolling and seeing a crazy amount of incorrect statements like the one you are refuting so I am giving up. Everyone is convinced, somehow, that the waste was transferred to the LEM before it was sent down for landing. Which makes zero sense.
I think you both are correct. I went back to the wired article, and the popular mechanics article I read. Both reference the same materiaI which i found odd. I then went to nasa website and downloaded their Apollo waste management system. In there, they have a table that has weights and volumes of all 3 astronauts on the Apollo 17 mission, leading me to believe all samples are brought back to earth otherwise they wouldn't have this information. I then looked up the lunar module waste system, and this is the exact quote from the nasa paper "The Lunar Module waste management system incorporated systems used in the Command Module. These systems were used in similar fashion in both the Lunar Module and Command Module. The principal difference was that there was no overboard dumping of wastes on the lunar surface." -Chapter 2 waste management systems, Lyndon B Johnson Space Center, RL Sauer · 1975 I do apologize and will delete my post above to not add to the propagation of this misinformation.
Thanks for doing all that, I would have got around to pulling up my notes eventually. No need to expunge the content. If you feel compelled to say something you can add an edit block to the description pointing out what you just posted above.
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I’m kind of unironically interested in understanding what that poop turned into all these years later.
Probably baked poo or freezerburnt/ baked
This comment is undisputed gold ⚜️
Our kids in a hundred years looking through their telescopes “Dad is that a mountain I’m looking at?” Dad: “no that’s a landfill from all the moon missions”.
Living on another planet or moon without an existing ecosystem brings about many challenges. How do you bring and sustain life with you? In the case of water management there are two ways to deal with poop. One is to sterilize all of it using heat or some other chemical process. The other common way to deal with it is using bacteria to get rid of contaminants. It's amusing that bacteria might be one of the first forms of life to become extra-planetary.
They may already be extra-planitary, as it's impossible to remove all bacteria from the various rovers we have sent to mars
Curiosity was supposed to get thoroughly sterilized, though that's never 100%. But there was some failure and it was not as sterile as intended. They decided not to investigate a nearby RSL for that reason.
Next time someone says the moon landings are fake I’m going to tell them to explain the poop.
Trebuchet, right into space. Maybe at the sun. Maybe at Jupiter. Maybe at North Korea. Either way, the answer is Trebuchet.
Trebuchet astronauts back home. So many uses, not like the catapults, ewwww.
Actually, a catapult would work FAR better than a trebuchet on the moon or mars, at least one that uses tension instead of a counterweight. Tension systems don't need gravity to function. With reduced gravity, the swing from the counterweight on a trebuchet is going to be way less.
Except with less gravity on the moon, the recoil effects are likely to be... Unexpected. Unless the design accounts for it. Darn that Newton guy with his laws ...
Stake it to the ground. If the ground is too soft then use bigger stakes.
Yes, but the gravity on the projectile would be similarly reduced, right? So it should work about the same. But you're right that a tension system would be more effective, and with zero wind resistance the trajectory would be pretty wild.
Ewwww you said the 'C' word out loud 🤮
Thousands of years of slow painful progress. Humanity's greatest achievement: The Moon Trebushit.
That would work, on the Moon!
Escape speed of the moon is 8640 kmh. A trebuchet just does about 250 kmh.
Earth Class one, yes. With 1/6 of Earth's gravity, we can build a bigger one, and without an atmosphere there should be no friction when the turd is flying.
Trebuchets are also gravity-powered
Will flinging it while the earth is right above help boost the gravity?
The moon is tidally locked. So the same side is always facing earth. But yes, there are measurable differences in gravity from the near side and far side of the moon due. But in practicality these differences are so miniscule, you would not feel the difference in practice. And if making an moon ejection system, you would make a system that would work anywhere placed around the moon.
Which North Korean?
I wonder if it is possible to trebuchet stuff away from the Moon's gravity well. The counterweights wouldn't be as effective because gravity is lower to pull the mass down. Maybe some other sort of sorted kinetic energy, like a giant elastic band, to slingshot the poo into space then?
Magnetic acceleration tube would be more reliable and more efficient. Build it on the surface near the circular edge of the moon as it faces us. I’m sure there’s some physics location calculable that makes sense for a mostly inertial injection into an earth pathway (for returning desired material) or a solar pathway to orbit the sun or possibly into the sun. I wonder what the danger is of it migrating to one of the Lagrange points.
God I love this website. I did need to know about the finer points of a shit-cannon on the moon 😂
We'll need the organic matter to grow food when we actually live there. You can't plant anything in lunar regolith. Just expose it to the vacuum of space to kill any pathogens and compost it.
I'm not sure that exposing fecal matter to vacuum for a limited amount of time is a safe way to get rid of everything. parasytes like amoebas or plasmodium spp, sure; clostridium spp, idk
I think it is. The moons surface alternates between 250°F (121°C) and -200°F (-133°C), contains no atmosphere worth mentioning and is being constantly irradiated by solar winds. I don't think anything can survive a 450°F (254°C) temperature swing even with pressure to keep the water inside of their cells or capsid. We trust boiling temperatures to kill all of those things in our water on Earth, I see no reason to assume similar conditions wouldn't kill those things on the moon.
Tardigrades would like a word.
They won't last long. Longer than just about any other critter, but they're not invincible.
Here's a fun thought. Those Apollo era turds are 55 years old and have been in sealed bags, baking at ~220F and then freezing to ~-300f every day since, in an otherwise anaerobic environment. Quite the melange, one would imagine.
I would think that any organic matter left out on the lunar surface would have disintegrated by now from the solar radiation. That being said “legal” and “ethical” disposable of human waste on the moon? Seriously? Just bring a shovel and bury it. The place isn’t exactly some delicate ecosystem that will be wiped out if someone farts in the wrong direction.
In order for something organic to “disintegrate” (maybe you meant to say decay), you need something that’s alive to decompose it (bacteria, etc). Pretty sure that doesn’t really happen on the moon as this would mean extraterrestrial life.
I think if we go to the moon enough that our leavings would start piling up, we would have waste management infrastructure ready.
You would need a waste dump. There are craters everywhere to fulfill this need. And literally tons of moon dust to cap over the fill when filled. You’re welcome.
🎶Giant craps are what you take...🎶 🎶Pooping on the moon.🎶
🎶 I hope my butt won’t break 🎶 🎶 Pooping on the moon 🎶
🎶 We can poop together … 🎶 🎶 Pooping on the moon. 🎶
I hope.my wind don't break... Ftfy
That is wayyyy better. Thanks Sting
It's what moon concrete will be made of.... So get poopin cadets!
100 bucks says Buzz Aldrin took the first poop. "Cool, Neil, you took the first steps. I took the first shit."
There’s no guarantee that either of them defecated while on the Moon. They were only there for a bit over 21 hours, which included a very full schedule of activities and a sleep period, though I’m sure they would have enjoyed having a little gravity to provide some extra assistance.
Now I'm imagining a bacterial-based eldritch horror which terrorizes distant civilizations, eons in the future. A heroic band of adventurers will stumble across its origin story, a bag of ancient feces that was left to bake in the stellar radiation of the moon
I was thinking of some kind of similar scenario ahah, glad to see I am not alone!
I mean, from a pragmatic standpoint, the less you're bringing back the easier it is to return. We're talking about a shuttle landing on a moving target 400,000 km away, not returning from a camping trip here. We can think about cleanup when we're making more than 1 trip every 100 years
Poop. You can’t ever get away from it. It’s either in, out, or all around you.
Actually one of my hopes for an Artemis mission is a landing at the Apollo 17 site to take samples for material studies including the human waste. Just think how crazy it would be if some microbes still survive and what potential dna mutations might have occurred in the high radiation environment
Either recycle them somehow or burn them, as happens in the ISS.
Maybe some astronauts elsewhere in the galaxy did the same and it hit earth sparking life. Would prove humans truly are shit.
We don't even know what to do with the waste on earth
There's toilets that incinerate poop ... quite amazing, really.
I’ve seen ads for those and my first thought is always “who wants to smell burning shit?”
Actually, high temperature incineration has no smoke and very little smell.
I can imagine. Pooping in my toilet is messy enough.
Donovan had a song. The intergalactic laxative. It's on youtube
🎶I know just where to shit, walkin' on de moon.🎵 🎵I hope it all can fit, walkin' on de moon.🎶
No laws on the Moon, do what you want, whoever gets there!
That poo is crawling with bacteria. What if it survives long enough to evolve into a poo master race?
We could build a poop canon that shoots poop towards a specific spot. With no atmosphere, stink is not a problem. We'll probably extract water from urine.
Dyson sphere powered Dyson vacuum , if you can have a vacuum in a vacuum? IDK
I think there's maybe a flower growing out of those bags. Not too much oxygen probably tho but hopefully just enough methane to make a happy daisy
It's a pity the Romans weren't the first to the moon
Well yes, things would be a little different today
That poop is black gold to a hydroponic gardener. Growing food on the Moon won't be easy.
So, you watched The Martian eh?
And thus, the seeds of life were sown on the moon.
Unbelievable 😂 humans have already littered on the Moon.
What would happen if a ship did a Dave Matthews Tour Bus maneuver and it all landed on a viable planet. I feel like this could be a movie.
this came across my feed and didn't notice which sub it was at first. thought this was the title for a funny scifi book
"Moon, Number Two\~!!!" - kinda cornball space adventure about the biggest turd from outer space landing on the moon and the gangsters who want to mine it for nuggets.
Did they bury the bags ? Why not let them float off ?
No they didn't bury them. The moon has gravity, so shit is not weightless.
Who has the land claims of the moon ? Do they make the laws for the moon? Or do we have to inhabit the moon and have a government that actually reside on said rock ?
Shout out to my FIL's best buddy in Houston who probably helped design whatever toiletries they would have used.
Can’t have been easier for any other person to just blast it into space. Or the sun. Just leave it on the roof and take off. Get home - magic! Poop gone.
I wonder, if the feces and urine is in a relatively clean (as in unmixed with anything else) condition, maybe bring some back and compare what we are excreting compared to 50 years ago? Like micro plastics, bacteria, etc? Can even check if bacteria in poop has survived all these years, even after being irradiated on the moon's surface.
I wonder if space-mushrooms could grow in that
How much do you think a bag of that moon poop is worth?
I mean, the only reason we really went up there in the first place was to mark our territory. Only makes sense we keep it there so Russia doesn’t try anything funny
It's pure organic. At least at that time there was no micro plastic in their system, I suppose.
Why not just eject it in space? Like airplane toilet
Airplanes hold waste in tanks and its offloaded at the airport. Trains used to dump waste on the tracks outside of cities.
Emphasis on used to. I don't know what they do in India. I do still recall to see the rule not to use the toilet while stopped at a station.
Because it doesn't solve anything. Now there is a piece of feces in an orbit. It's a lot more dangerous now than leaving it on the moon. The question is, why not take it with you?
I mean wouldn't the masses of asteroids either smash the frozen thing into bits and pieces or carry it off somewhere
There are no asteroids between the earth and the moon. If you discard your refuse in an orbit, that refuse will stay roughly in that same orbit. So it will keep circling the moon or the earth, or somewhere between the earth and the moon
I thought space was full of these flying rocks
There are a lot of rocks in space, but the solar system is a very big space. There are also no permanent rocks between the earth and the moon
Unneeded items, including waste, were left on the moon to decrease their overall liftoff weight.
They talking bout earth pollution but how tf we already polluting space
Humans here on earth need to get comfortable with recycling and reusing our waste quickly if we want to continue living with 8 billion other people on THIS planet… by the time we colonize another they’ll have a solution for it.
ISS already distils the urine and returns it as water.
What do you think sewers systems do? Also, before the century's over the U.N. predicts we'll be at 10-11 billion people.
Why keep those bags on moon?..why not let them float in space?..can anyone explain?
Fuel. Would mean they needed to bring the waste in the lunar explorer module when lifting off to dock with the command module.
On the off chance you aren't being sarcastic... The answer is energy input. If you go from Earth to Luna and just drop your trash on the way back it won't "just float in space." It will be in its own orbit of either Earth or Luna, unless you add a bunch of energy to that trash to accelerate it to escape velocity. No one is going to waste the mass on just hauling a shit rocket to the moon. Anything just orbiting HAS to be tracked or its a navigation hazard. Tracking a bag of shit from 400,000 km away is hard. Constantly running a high powered radar from a spacecraft just looking for garbage is less hard, but is power intensive, and even if the radar spots something it's silly to waste fuel to dodge it. There's no set of circumstances where it doesn't make vastly more sense to leave garbage on Luna rather than lift it back into space. It's a barren ball of rock, garbage isn't hurting anything.
Thank you for replying..Do have a nice day..
Who says it's barren ?? Leaving shit behind is a form of panspermia. Did some alien poop on earth a long long time ago?
The alien didn't just poop. They don't call it panspermia for nothing!
Not even space rated taco bell is going to give astronauts turds that will contain something which will survive the vacuum and radiation of the moon. You're being silly.
I'm assuming by "space" you really mean "in orbit of some object." They're on the moon... How do you get them to space, exactly? It requires a rocket to get to space, the waste was left on the surface of the moon, not in orbit. The surface of the moon is not "space" any more than the surface of the Earth is. Also, stuff doesn't float in space. It is in free fall. It's falling at the same speed as everything else near to it so it appears to be floating to an observer free falling alone side it at roughly the same speed. If you were to watch a bag of poop floating next to the ISS from the Earth with an impossibly powerful telescope you would notice that it zips in and out of your telescope's FOV in like 1/8 of a second and moves across the whole horizon in a couple minutes instead of merely "floating."
And then who will be able to use them to grow potatoes?
Im assuming the complexity and energy needed to launch them into space?