Perceptions from a Pewboy

When I was a boy, I used to spend a great deal of time wondering about strange things. For example, one of the things that concerned me about being an astronaut (which I was convinced was my vocational destiny) was the uncertainty of how astronauts dealt with certain biological processes when they were in space. Being a modest lad, I was greatly troubled by the question of how astronauts maintained privacy when having to…uh…”jettison some excess fuel.” After all, such matters were never addressed in any episode of Star Trek. Did each crew member have his own toilet? Was there a plumber on board? Or did Scotty have to handle those matters too? (”I’m working as fast as I can, Captain!!!”)

At any rate, you can imagine my instantaneous transport back to my childish curiosity when I read this story by Marcia Dunn in a recent USA Today:

NASA rushed Wednesday to get a special pump on board shuttle Discovery to fix a balky toilet at the International Space Station. The space station’s Russian-built toilet has been acting up for the past week. The three male residents have temporarily bypassed the problem, which involves urine collection, not solid waste.

Russian space officials are providing the pump to launch aboard Discovery on Saturday. The shuttle’s seven astronauts arrived at Kennedy Space Center a few hours ahead of the start of countdown Wednesday afternoon.

At the same time, a NASA employee was en route to Florida from Russia with the 1 1/2-foot-long pump and related hardware, which was packed in a diplomatic pouch and carried onto the commercial jetliner as 35 pounds of hand luggage.

To make room for the pump inside Discovery’s crammed cabin, NASA was going to pull out some wrenches, a spare part for the space station’s oxygen generator, and a microbe-killing device for use in the European space lab.

‘Clearly, having a working toilet is a priority for us, so some of these things that we didn’t need for the next six months or so could wait,’ said payload manager Scott Higginbotham.

It all sounds so painfully mundane, doesn’t it?! This is hardly the life of glamorous adventure that I associated with space travel when I was a boy!

OK, because I am experiencing some boyish excitement about the whole matter, I will go ahead and offer these next tidbits. I ask for your forgiveness in advance.

Do you know which astronaut Russia should send to the space station to fix the broken toilet?

“Urine” Gagarin.

Was that beneath you? Try this one: What do you call an astronaut manually trying to unclog a space toilet?

Kneel Armstrong!!

Well…I tried.

If you’ll excuse me, I am suddenly thirsty for some Tang.

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