How to Astronaut

by Terry Virts

  One question that I’m routinely asked is “Did you dream in space?” I often dreamed of Earth during that month when I fell asleep to the sound of rain. Bizarre dreams, in places and with people whom I hadn’t seen in years. I remember one particularly detailed and scary one, climbing through abandoned houses and forts through a forest on Earth, with someone or something chasing me. It was jarring to be so vividly on Earth in a dream and then wake up floating, take my earplugs out and blindfold off, and hear the continuous hum of the fans and the artificial glare of cabin lights. Dreaming while weightless was one of the most sublime experiences of my life, if sometimes scary. It was even more powerful than I had imagined before I first left Earth.

  Interestingly, when I wasn’t listening to rain or other sounds of Earth, my dreams were about space. Of me floating through dark asteroid fields, no spaceship, just moving through the blackness of space trying to avoid the gray asteroids. I wondered if I was subconsciously thinking of the dangers of space debris impacting the station. They weren’t nightmares, but I think they captured the essence of space. Though we usually think of planets and galaxies and nebulae when we think of space, the reality is that the vast majority is just dark, cold blackness. And my dreams often took me there.

  No Showers for 200 Days? No Problem!

  Bathing in Space

  The space station is, in many ways, a thirteen-year-old boy’s dream. You can float around like Superman. You can eat whatever you want and your parents aren’t there to nag you. You have your own room and you close the door and nobody tells you to clean it. Best of all—no showers! For 200 days in a row!

  Now for those of you who aren’t thirteen-year-old boys, you may be saying to yourself, “Gross!” So let me ease your fears. It is possible to take care of hygiene, the NASA term for washing up, pretty effectively while in space. There are several aspects to staying clean, each with very different solutions: showering, brushing your teeth, washing your hair, cleaning your clothes, etc. Let’s start with the big one—showering.

  NASA actually flew a space shower on the Skylab space station in the 1970s. It was about the size of an Earth shower, with a big bag around it to capture flying water droplets. I think it worked OK for the astronauts’ weekly shower, but the real problem was the cost. Today, a half-liter water bottle costs about $20K to send to the ISS. You can imagine how many of those water bottles are required to take a shower. Even though much of that water could be recycled, a shower is still a massive and expensive thing. So we found a better way to solve the problem of stink.

  I used a wet towel to wash every day during my seven months in space. It worked great, and I never missed taking showers at all. The mechanics were straightforward. I would start out by filling an empty drink bag with hot water, which I squirted into a towel. NASA had budgeted for each astronaut to get a new towel every two weeks, so there were plenty available. I would get naked and wash from head to toe. I would also use rinseless shampoo to wash my hair, the same kind that hospitals use for bedridden patients. When done, I’d use a separate towel to dry off. And voilà, clean astronaut. The whole process took maybe fifteen to twenty minutes, but it got me clean and not stinky, which my crewmates appreciated. As a backup, there was deodorant.

  I usually washed after working out. Normal activity in space doesn’t get you dirty or sweaty at all—a day without exercise was a day when you basically were as clean at night as you had been when you woke up. And your hair didn’t get messed up because you didn’t sleep on a pillow or go out on a windy day. But exercise was a different matter altogether: a good thirty-minute run on the treadmill or hour-long exercise on the ARED weight-lifting machine made me sweat. A lot. And, therefore, need a “shower.”

  So floating there naked for ten minutes as you washed off would be, to say the least, awkward. Even though we are all brothers and sisters, that situation is best avoided.

  The location where we washed varied. The ground engineers wanted us to clean up in Node 3, the life-support module where the bathroom, ARED, and treadmill are and the Cupola is attached. It seemed to make sense that it would also be the hygiene location. However, Node 3 is the busiest module on the ISS; there is always someone working out, running on the treadmill, going to the bathroom, looking out the Cupola, performing maintenance on some critical ISS life-support equipment, etc. So floating there naked for ten minutes as you washed off would be, to say the least, awkward. Even though we are all brothers and sisters, that situation is best avoided. Nobody needs to see your crewmates’ junk floating weightlessly as they wash while you run on the treadmill.

  So my crew used a module called PMM for hygiene. PMM is a large stowage module that is both the garage and closet of the ISS. It’s full of equipment and usually doesn’t have any astronauts working in there, so we put up a curtain to cover the hatch opening and agreed among ourselves—wash up in the PMM, close the curtain while you’re naked, and open it when you’re done. That worked. However, while you’re wiping down with a wet towel or washing hair, water droplets inevitably float off in all directions. If you have seen the IMAX film A Beautiful Planet, you’ve seen my shower scene, in which water droplets fly everywhere in 3D. The other agreement we had was that we’d clean up any mess we made so that the equipment in PMM didn’t get too wet or moldy. Also, we each commandeered a location in PMM for storing our shower gear—towels, shampoo, soap, deodorant, etc.

  There were a few days when the PMM wasn’t available because it was being relocated from a hatch on Node 1 to a new port on Node 3, so we had to find an alternate location. For me, the JLP was the best alternative. JLP stands for “small storage module attached to the Japanese lab.” It is out of the way and usually free of astronauts, so it’s a good place to wash. The Japanese flight controllers weren’t happy about us using their module for hygiene because they wanted to keep it pristine. But the crew needs to clean up somewhere, so we used it, but sparingly. The Russians used a module called FGB for hygiene—their storage module. It was the first segment of the station launched, back in 1998, and it’s in the middle of the ISS. They would partially close the hatch when washing, but if you had to float through there while they were showering, it was either wait until they were finished or have a very awkward moment as you floated by, avoiding unintentional contact. But hey, sacrifices must be made in the conquest of space.

  A few of my colleagues talked about showering in their own sleep station, but in my mind that was a bad idea. I didn’t want to get my sleeping bag, laptops, and personal gear wet and moldy. I don’t think this happened very often.

  In addition to using hot water and normal towels, we also had towels that were designed for campers and were pretreated with soap. I would take one, fill it with hot water, wait a few minutes, and voilà—hot, soapy towel with which to shower. Which was great. For one shower. Then the next day the soap was mostly gone, so the towel itself could be used again, but pretty much with no soap. Also, there were two types of these camping towels. One was bad—it was basically a paper towel that would disintegrate into a million crumbs as you washed yourself. Our crew had an endless supply of these, and I tried my best to use them up so that future crews wouldn’t have to deal with them. There was also a much better towel, more substantial, that you could use for several days. We used these camping towels for getting wet and soapy and a normal bath towel for drying off.

  Jack Lousma taking a shower in Skylab, circa 1973. We didn’t have a shower; we only had wet towels and rinseless shampoo.

  The soap bags were exactly like drink bags, except you got soapy water instead of tea or coffee or Tang when you filled them full of hot water. I used one of those every other day, until after two weeks I noticed that my supply was out. I called Houston and asked where my next stash of soap was, and they sheepishly answered, “Uh, well, that’s all the soap you have for the whole mission.” I had misread the usage spreadsheet that told me how often I got a new pair of underwear, deodorant, T-shirt, and, you guessed it, soap bag. It w
as once every two weeks, not two days. Oops. I found a few emergency soap bags stashed here and there, but for the most part the only soap I had during the 200-day mission was from the camping towels. At least I didn’t stink, though the lack of soap was bad for my skin.

  Another major daily hygiene routine is brushing teeth. Every astronaut is given a few toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste to last their half-year mission, and I’ve never heard of anyone running out. There are basically two techniques for brushing your teeth. Some folks spit out after they are done, and some swallow the used toothpaste. For me, taking the extra time and using up one of my limited supply of towels to spit into was more hassle than it was worth, so I learned to brush my teeth with just a little bit of toothpaste and wash it down with a little water. It wasn’t so bad, and I got a few months out of one tube of Crest, brushing twice a day.

  An interesting aspect of washing in space is dealing with wet towels. They are left out to dry, one end clipped to a wall or ceiling. The whole towel stands straight up, as if it were hanging from a rod here on Earth, so you have to find an out-of-the-way location for it to stick out into. It dries out within a few hours later, from the cabin air blowing over it, which is good for two reasons. First, you can use your towel again. The (good) camping towels could usually be used for a few days, and a normal body towel could last for several weeks. The second and most important reason for drying these towels is that the water is recycled. It goes from towel to ISS atmosphere, where it is reclaimed as humidity and then purified into drinking water or split into H2 and O2 for breathable oxygen. The H2 is combined with reclaimed CO2 to make water, which is used to drink or rehydrate food, and so on and so on.

  Overall, astronauts keep clean, sort of. During my time on the ISS, and comparing notes with many fellow astronauts over the years, skin problems were common. Rashes, bumps, red spots, and general discomfort. Nothing too serious, but bad skin is a very common ailment for ISS astronauts. There are several potential reasons for this. Perhaps certain types of mold that are on board irritate skin, perhaps there are adverse effects of weightlessness and fluid shift on skin, or maybe having one bag of soap isn’t enough to keep skin clean. One of my top recommendations after Expedition 42/43 was to improve the skin cleanliness situation on the ISS. Although we didn’t stink, we needed better skin care in order to prevent some of those rashes.

  So, again, if you’re a thirteen-year-old boy, a flight to the ISS is perfect for you. No showers for half a year or more! But you have to swallow your toothpaste and have nasty skin rashes.

  The Glamour of Space Travel

  Going to the Bathroom in Space, Uncensored

  OK. Everyone knew this chapter was coming. There are certain questions that astronauts are always asked: “What’s it like in space?” “Is it hard to adjust to gravity after you come home?” “Did you see aliens?” But the most common question, no matter what the age or country of the person asking, is “How do you go to the bathroom in space?” The answer is simple. Very carefully. Seriously. This is one procedure that nobody wants to mess up.

  The actual mechanics are pretty straightforward. On Earth we have gravity to make sure everything goes in the right direction. In space we use airflow. Fans blow air through both the urine hose as well as the number two can to help everything get to where it’s going, and then stay there. In fact, there was an emergency procedure on the ISS to quickly close the valve on the hose in the event of a fan malfunction—because waste would begin to float out. And that would be a bad day in space. Imagine a Porta Potty at your local football stadium being tipped on its side and then floating. You just don’t want to go there.

  As the shuttle pilot, one of my jobs was to keep the WHC (NASA acronym for toilet) in working order. As a rookie I was very motivated to do a great job, so I went all in, determined to keep the cleanest bathroom in shuttle program history. Before launch, my first task was to select cleaning supplies—toilet paper, baby wipes, and disinfectant wipes. When we saw the actual bag of supplies I had ordered, we laughed out loud. It was huge! There was enough to run an average household’s facilities for a year, but I wasn’t fazed; I was determined to keep that pot clean. After our two-week mission we had barely made a dent in all of it, so I left a huge bag of supplies for the station crew after we undocked. When I came back to the ISS in 2014, there were probably still packs of Huggies wipes that I had left there in 2010.

  A few words about space potties. The shuttle had the WHC, and the ISS has two Russian-built ACYs (Russian acronym for toilet), but the basic principle behind both of these devices is the same. There is a hose for urine and a big can for poop. On our shuttle mission, each crewmember had their own funnel for the urine hose. There were different shapes for men and women; I never asked why and don’t really want to know. But on the ISS we all shared the same funnel, men and women. The shuttle brought all of its waste back to Earth (bless the ground crew who had to clean it out), but the ISS ACY had disposable KTO tanks (Russian acronym for poop bucket) that would be packed into Progress cargo ships to eventually burn up in the atmosphere, in a streaking poop meteor hurtling five miles per second over the Pacific Ocean to a fiery death.

  The big difference between the US and Russian systems is how they handle urine. The shuttle simply brought it back to Earth. The Russian toilet stored it in a ЕДУ (Russian acronym for pee bucket) that could also be destroyed when the Progress burned up, but it was more often transferred to the American segment for recycling. That’s right, we turn yesterday’s coffee into tomorrow’s coffee by recycling urine. This is an extremely useful capability because it costs about $40,000 to launch a liter of water into orbit, and recycling as much water as possible saves taxpayers serious money. Not to mention that when we eventually go back to the Moon and on to Mars there won’t be much, if any, water there for us to use, so we will need to recycle. As far as the “yuck factor” goes, it wasn’t even an issue; the water on the ISS tasted completely normal. You just had to close your eyes and get over the yellow color—just kidding. It looked and tasted and smelled just like normal water; the US recycling system really was remarkable.

  The first time doing anything in space was always a little nerve-racking, and when it came to using the bathroom for the first time it was especially so. I absolutely did not want to be the guy who broke the toilet, so I very carefully followed every step of the checklist. Yes, there’s a NASA procedure for number one and a different one for number two, and both were fairly time-consuming. After a few days I got pretty efficient, but I still diligently followed that checklist, step-by-step, until one fateful time on flight day eleven.

  By my eleventh day in space I had gotten pretty cocky. I wasn’t half-bad at floating, could keep track of stuff without losing it, and could get dressed in the morning without banging off the walls. When it was time to take a bathroom break that afternoon, I was in a hurry to get back to my work, and I decided to go number two without using the checklist. It’s important to understand how the poop bucket works on the shuttle—it was a big tank, the size of a small dishwasher, that you sat on top of. First you had to open what we called the guillotine, an ominous-looking hatch, and when you closed it you had to make sure there was no “debris” in the way, or you’d have a mess on your hands. Once the guillotine was open, you sat on it and placed handles over your thighs to prevent you from floating away.

  It was extremely important to have proper aim—you had to deliver the package on target, and you did not want it to scrape against the side of the guillotine or the seat, or you’d have another mess. Believe it or not, the ground training potty at the Johnson Space Center in Houston had a camera down in the hole, and new astronauts would sit on it and practice aligning until they had the muscle memory of what proper aim felt like. Having good aim was that important.

  The first few times I went through this procedure in space, it was difficult. There was no gravity to help the poop come out, so I had to provide all of that force with my muscles, which invo
lved a lot of straining and grunting. At times I thought I’d pop a vein in my forehead. This procedure was similar to the AGSM (Air Force acronym for anti-g straining maneuver, used by fighter pilots when pulling g’s). Thankfully, I was always able to successfully complete the mission; some folks on other missions couldn’t and needed help with medication.

  On that fateful STS-130 flight day eleven, I was in a hurry. I floated into the WHC, closed the small curtain, got myself aligned, and started to grunt. Everything was working fine until something didn’t feel quite right. I stopped immediately and remembered—ugh—I had forgotten to open the guillotine. OMG, that was not what I wanted to happen. So I slowly floated up a few inches, looked down, and yup, there it was, gently swaying in the breeze, very lightly attached to the closed guillotine. Without panicking, I quickly got some tissue, wrangled the offender, floated it next to me as I quickly wiped up the minor mess, opened the guillotine, floated it down into the bucket, and then finished my business, this time with the hatch properly open. Disaster narrowly averted. My crewmates and I still laugh so hard about that incident—the perils of spaceflight.

  When people eventually fly to Mars, something as simple as a broken toilet could end up killing the crew, so it’s a very important subject—even if it does lend itself to thirteen-year-old-boy humor.

  Besides following the checklist and keeping everything clean, there was toilet maintenance to be done on the shuttle. First, midway through the mission I compacted the solid waste. The big toilet bucket had a net inside, and I rotated it to scoop up everything and compact it, freeing as much room as possible for the second half of the mission. Before compaction, looking down into that bucket reminded me of the asteroid scene in The Empire Strikes Back. Some colleagues described it as a “turd-nado.” Whatever the term, after a week of six people using the facility, the toilet needed compacting to make room for the next week.