New news NASA's new astronaut suit comes with an 'integrated bathroom'

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NASA engineers are working on the development of a new space suit for the astronauts of their missions. In the new suit there is a very special feature: a long-term waste management system. An integrated bathroom, to understand each other.

The system is not really new: the astronauts of the Apollo mission had this system in the 1970s, but on this occasion NASA plans that the astronauts can survive in their suits for periods of up to six days.

Goodbye to the diapers

The new suits, called Orion Crew Survival System Suits (OCSSS) will be used by astronauts in the upcoming NASA Orion missions, which will take the human being beyond the Earth's lower orbit.

This type of mission is suitable, for example, to take a group of astronauts to the Moon and then return them to Earth. Although the Orion ship has a bathroom, at NASA they want to have a plan B in case the capsule is depressurized and the astronauts have to use their suits permanently to survive.

That means that the astronauts with these suits could urinate and defecate in them during all that time. With them would replace the traditional "diapers" (MAG, Maximum Absorbency Garments) that are used in the two types of suits (launch and reentry and those of extravehicular missions) of NASA missions.

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A problematic system for women

Although MAGs are easy to use and have a simple design, NASA has been trying to offer a different solution in this area for some time. At the end of 2016 they launched the so-called "Space Poop Challenge" to manage waste from defecating, urinating or having menstruation, and already established that the system should last for 144 hours.
Those solutions posed the challenge of being integrated into the space suits of the Orion missions, so NASA ended up going to the solution of the Apollo missions.

One of the main challenges facing this NASA project is that of female astronauts, who never used the Apollo mission system and ended up using MAGs, like male astronauts. Although there is a patent on this, it was never used operatively.

The solution could be in an external aspiration system, but it seems that for the time being that part of the problem will still give NASA a few headaches, which deals with additional challenges such as the beautiful public of the woman and the risk of infections.

Meanwhile the inspiration seems to be coming from surprising segments such as the campsite, where apparently there are a series of portable devices to urinate that could be useful to propose alternative solutions for NASA.