Hopefully, Space Crew is Flushed With Success After Toilet Fix

By C.W. Gusewelle, The Kansas City Star, Mo.

Jun. 8–In the ages-long narrative of mankind’s adventures, ours has been a chapter of unmatched marvels.

The conquering of time and distance through powered flight…

Breathtaking medical advances that have prolonged life and made possible the elimination or management of dreadful diseases…

Miraculous new means of communication, enabling ideas and information to reach the remotest corners of the world in only moments…

But for sheer boldness — for the capacity to inspire mind-expanding wonder — surely nothing has surpassed the determination of our species to venture far beyond the limits of gravity and the environs of our home planet.

So from time to time I tune to NASA’s television channel to see what fabulous plans and speculations are occupying U.S. space scientists at the moment.

Lately they have been talking about toilets.

The one in question was the Russian-made toilet on the international space station whose flush mechanism wasn’t functioning properly.

As anyone who’s ever traveled in the former Soviet Union can tell you, the manufacture and maintenance of dependable commodes has long been a problem in that country.

In fact, during the most dangerous periods of the Cold War, that was the one bit of reassurance we could cling to. If a nation can’t keep its toilets working, how likely is it that its missiles will fire?

This subject is one about which I have a considerable body of experience.

My wife and I, in our married life, have had three homes. The first was a rented cottage outside the city. In winter, the bathroom pipes froze, making it necessary to organize one’s mornings and evenings around trips to the nearest filling station.

So we bought a house with two bathrooms. One afternoon I came home and found the breakfast room ceiling on the floor.

Disoriented, I went outside to look at the roof. But the day was cloudless and the roof was sound. What had happened was that the lead bend under the upstairs stool had failed, flooding the room below.

The same thing happened in our next house, only this time it brought down the ceiling of the entry hall.

Two houses, two lead bends.

With our daughters, we lived for a year, 1984-85, in Paris. The apartment we leased had been unoccupied for some months. The utilities were disconnected and the plumbing, which was corroded from disuse, emitted only a trickle.

I called the concierge for help. There would be a wait for activation of the lights and telephone, he said, but it was possible to live for a while without those.

He would, however, attend to the plumbing problem immediately.

“A toilette,” he declared, “is indispensable.”

I agreed.

The report about the space station fixture went into considerable detail. The thing would flush only three times, after which it took two astronauts something like a quarter of an hour to do a temporary fix.

Three more flushes, and the process would have to be repeated.

For the station’s crew of three — two cosmonauts and one astronaut on — it amounted to a vexation and a waste of time. But with the arrival of the next U.S. shuttle, the number on board would temporarily increase to seven. At that point, the nuisance promised to escalate to a catastrophe.

We were told how many times a day (more than a half dozen on average) each occupant would need to use the commode. In all, it came to something like 50 visits. That was more information than I really cared to know.

Parts needed for repair of the toilet were flown to Florida and loaded aboard the shuttle Discovery. The shuttle with its precious cargo joined up with the space station on Monday.

Presumably, those replacement parts have now been installed, putting the defective fixture back in service.

That is the good news.

And the bad news?

Those replacement parts, like the toilet itself, were made in Russia.

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