NASA works on the creation of a space suit with a built-in toilet suitable for women

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NASA is working on a waste disposal system so that its astronauts can survive up to six days in space suits. However, they have found some complications when creating a suit for women, because pubic hair can make it difficult to use some mechanisms.

NASA engineers are working on a new space suit with a long-term urine and excreta disposal system; in fact, a built-in toilet, which is complicated in its feminine version.

Such a system has not been part of NASA's space suits since the Apollo Era, and the new waste disposal system will probably have much in common with those used in the 1970s. A particular challenge is that of the version for women. There were no females in the Apollo program and the technology in development has to overcome a real challenge.
The new suits, called OCSSS (Orion Crew Survival Systems), will be used by astronauts on NASA's next-generation human spacecraft, Orion, which can take humans far beyond Earth's low orbit. While the vehicle is not large enough to withstand a nine-month trip to Mars, Orion could take humans around the moon and return.

Like the previous space shuttle, Orion will be equipped with a toilet, but NASA is making contingency plans in case of emergencies, including the possibility that the capsule will depressurize and the astronauts have to remain in their suits to survive.

In fact, the agency wants astronauts to survive with their suits for up to six days, which means that men and women should be able to do things like eat, urinate and defecate without taking them off. "That's a really long time," Kirstyn Johnson, a NASA engineer who leads the design of the internal systems for launching and landing the Orion suit, told Space.com.

It's a long time to be in such a small space in the best conditions, "but living in a suit with all your waste for so long, could become dangerous very fast."

At the end of 2016, NASA announced the 'Space Poop Challenge', an open call for designs for a better waste disposal system for space suits. While the competition revealed new designs, all would require additional development to discover how to integrate them into a suit, Johnson said.

There was "nothing that we could use quite quickly in the Orion program." So, for now, "we're going back to what the astronauts used during the Apollo," Johnson said of the Orion space suit system.

The costumes will include a fecal bag that is very similar to those used in Apollo suits, and, for men, they will also use condom catheters, which remain the simplest and most direct approach, Johnson said.

An added problem with female astronauts

But an obvious problem that Apollo and the subsequent human space missions never solved was how to make a suit with urine collection systems for women.

By the time NASA welcomed its first class of female astronauts in 1978, the space shuttle program was only a few years away from its first launch, so women astronauts used the diaper system and the toilet to board.

In 1981, NASA engineers filed a patent for a women's urine collection device that included a vaginal insert to hold urine, but was never used in operational space suits. "For women, it gets a little harder, obviously, because of the geometry of a person's body, and then you have to deal with problems like pubic hair," Johnson said of the suit system. The pubic hair represents a challenge because the liquid tends to slide on it in microgravity.

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Johnson said that the main concern is the persistence of fluid in that area and that causes skin conditions. In addition, the system must also be secured in place (the condom catheter is essentially its own fixation mechanism) and pubic hair can also make it difficult to use an adhesive fixation mechanism.

Johnson and his colleagues must also consider things like how the waste disposal system can work while a woman has menstruation. Johnson explained that the idea is to design something that basically covers most of his public hair, while protecting him from infections such as urinary tract infections without stool.

An external vacuum system could be part of the solution; the suit would have to have a vacuum system that was not large or with high energy consumption. Then the suit needs something more practical. Ideally, the natural difference in pressure between the suit and the surrounding atmosphere could take away the astronaut's material, Johnson said, but a vacuum system could be more reliable.

The female system of urine elimination is not yet fully developed, and some aspects are secret, Johnson said, so it can not reveal all the details.

But the overall design is similar to the tube system used by female combat pilots to relieve themselves during long flights, or members of the armed forces who can not stop a task to relieve themselves. The device essentially has to be the size of a sanitary napkin, to encompass a complete area.

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