Last month during SpaceX's first mission carrying only private citizens into orbit, the Crew Dragon capsule's space toilet sprung a leak.
"Nobody really wants to get into the gory details," Inspiration4 mission commander Jared Isaacman told CNN at the time.
Oh sure we do, and now the story has been told. From the New York Times:
A tube that funnels urine into a tank broke loose during the Inspiration4 mission and leaked into the fan, which sprayed the urine in an enclosed area beneath Crew Dragon's floor, Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX official who once oversaw human spaceflight for NASA, told reporters on Monday night. He said the four passengers didn't notice anything was wrong during the mission.
"We didn't really even notice it, the crew didn't even notice it, until we got back," Mr. Gerstenmaier said. "When we got the vehicle back, we looked under the floor and saw the fact that there was contamination underneath the floor of Inspiration4."[…]
Toilets are crucial to NASA's space exploration ambitions as the agency aims to trek beyond the space station, toward the moon and eventually Mars.
I'd say so.
image (altered): NASA
