Ruptly
"The Artemis 2 mission to the Moon ran into 'toilet trouble' within hours of the launch, with the astronauts reporting an issue with what NASA describes as the 'Universal Waste Management System' - while the ground crew appeared to point the finger at those attempting to 'boldly go' to the bathroom. "I wanted to ask about the troubleshooting of the toilet that happened on that first day. Can you just explain to us what the issue was and how they fixed it and on a priority scale would you say this was a number one priority or a number two?" joked one reporter at Thursday's briefing. Judd Freeling, ascent flight director for the mission responded: "We had always planned to wet the toilet with some water that we had pulled out of the PWD, the potable water dispenser, and it turns out, I guess, we didn't put enough in, and so the pump was not fully wetted, and so it has automatic fault detection in that that if it's not fully wetted, it'll shut itself down." "So once we figured out that we didn't put enough water in, we put more in there, made sure that it was essentially primed, the pump was primed and then the toilet came right back up," he said. Howard Hugh, Orion programme manager, added: "We were able to bend out on the secondary line and we were able to demonstrate that and we didn't demonstrate it today the primary event line through the working toilet, so I think both lines are working well and really happy about that." Dr Lori Glaze, leading the Artemis programme, said it was "a great example of some of the procedural things as we're learning to work and live in the Orion capsule. We've got real humans in there. They're trying to live and learn, and we're going to learn things along the way. Oops, we need to do this. We need to prime it first. This is the kind of things we're going to get." Artemis 2 is carrying NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day mission around the moon and back. Following a successful lunar flyby, the astronauts will return to Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean. Future missions are set to land on the Moon - and prepare for the first crewed missions to Mars. It marks the first return to the Moon in over 50 years, since the Apollo programme of the 1960s and early 70s. "
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