🧑‍🚀 NASA’s Hilarious Fix to Astronauts’ Space Pee Problem

NASA solved its messy Apollo urine problem by renaming sizes from small - medium - large to large - gigantic - humongous.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
And Amanda jam Nation. Someone's read a fantastic book called
Packing for Mars. It was by a woman called Mary Roach,
and she looked at the human side of what it
takes to get people into space, at the very beginnings
of space exploration, and the research and the tests that
were done on the ground before we ever sent and
men as though were it was only men in space

(00:22):
then in the sixties into space. I'll just read the
introduction to this book, or this is a review of
the book. Space is a world devoid of the things
we need to live and thrive air, gravity, hot showers,
fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways
an exploration of what it means to be human. How
much can a person give up? How much weirdness can

(00:43):
they take? What happens when you can't walk for a year,
when you can't have sex, when you can't smell flowers?
What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a spacewalk?
Is it possible for the human body to survive a
bailout at seventeen thousand miles per hour? To answer these questions,
space agencies set up all manner of quizzical and startlingly
bizarre spaced simulations. And the book is full of how

(01:05):
they went about that. And they're the other movies and
you just think, oh, they go up there and they
dig around and they come back. The research that went
into how we get people into space. We'd spent millions
of years evolving to live here and then we look
up there, and in just a few decades we go,
you know what, let's go there, Let's go there. But
what did it take to get us there? And this

(01:26):
book is full of all the small details the NASA
men and women who used weird toilet facilities, who had
strange spinning experiments, who weren't the astronauts, they were as
human beings who volunteered for these tests. And here's something
I don't know if this is in the book, but
I saw it. Yes. The other day a scientists was
talking about some of the quirkiness of the toilet stuff

(01:47):
that happened in those early studies. And during the set
this run up to the Apollo missions, the engineers had
to come up with a clever way to allow these
men to urinate in space. When you're wearing your basic suits,
you can't go to a urin all let's face it.
So they built a device a bit like a sock

(02:07):
that you'd wear, had a little I guess it's like
a little condom, a sock that had a tube coming
out of the end of it that would collect the
urine into a bag for you to deal with later.
And to make sure there was a leakproof fit for everybody,
NASA decided to produce three different sizes, small, medium, and large.
They gave the astronauts the choice of which one they wanted.

(02:30):
Nearly every single astronaut, as you can imagine, selected the
large small. Almost no one went for the small or
the medium. And because of this, once they got into space,
there was urine flying all over the place. We have
a big problem. So back down on Earth, NASA were thinking,

(02:51):
how are we going to fix this? What's what's a
way to look at it? And instead of changing the apparatus,
they used psychology, so they didn't fiddle with the design
or the device in any way. They re labeled them
from small, medium, and large to large, gigantic, and humongous,
and as it says here, just like that, the problem

(03:13):
went away, no problem at all. But a great book. Yeah, well,
the book it's brilliant. It's called Packing for Mars by
Mary Roach, and it's just even you know, the flag
that was flown on the Apollo was the first one,
the Apollo eleven. Yep, even that flag, the research it
took to attach a flag to the outside there's no
air up there, and they had to attach it to

(03:35):
the pole so it would look like it was floating
in a breeze, which is what's made people think, oh, conspiracy.
They weren't there, there's no breeze, and blah blah blah.
That was all designed. Every single moment of that was designed.
The maths behind it is inspirational. It really is packing
for Mars. One wonders, what about packing for Uranus. You've

(03:56):
overpacked large, humongous for Brendan