Astronauts stuck using ‘special bags’ as $23 million toilet gets clogged

Everything about the Artemis II mission has gone more or less according to plan — the lunar flyby, the systems checks, the long cruise back toward Earth. Then the toilet broke. Hours after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, the spacecraft’s Universal Waste Management System, a piece of equipment that cost NASA $23 million to develop, began malfunctioning.

What happened? The crew cannot flush wastewater into space. According to an AFP report, the faecal disposal system, which is in a separate conduit, is working fine, and it’s strictly a urine problem.