How Do You Go to the Bathroom In Space?

by William R. Pogue

  79. What was your favorite entertainment?

  I found that looking at the Earth with the binoculars was the most pleasant form of off-duty activity. The Earth was fascinating, and I never tired of looking at it. Next to this, I enjoyed the books and music the most. Floating acrobatics were also a lot of fun.

  80. Did you have any puzzles?

  No, but I think that’s a great idea. I enjoy working crossword puzzles and cryptograms. In the future, I think electronic games will be used on space missions. They could be designed to improve operator skills in performing certain experiments on board.

  81. Could you play basketball in space?

  We didn’t, but that’s an interesting possibility. I don’t think you could play basketball in the normal way. Dribbling would be a real challenge. We had three small balls in the recreation kit, and we played with them occasionally. When we threw them around, they bounced all over the place because of weightlessness. The hardest part was trying to find the ball when you were done. I do think it would be possible to think up an interesting ball-and-hoop game for weightlessness.

  82. Were you excited or scared at liftoff?

  One of the NASA doctors asked me this same question, and I told him I didn’t feel particularly excited. He said, “Well, that may be true, but your heart rate went from 48 to 120 at liftoff.” I still don’t think I was scared, but I must have been excited.

  83. What was it like on the rocket going up?

  When the engines fire up, they sound like muffled explosions, and there are a lot of noises from engine pumps and liquid fuel (propellants) surging through the large pipes (feed lines). Early in the launch, there is a lot of shaking and vibration. As the rocket picks up speed, it lurches, twitches, and wiggles from thrust pulsations and abrupt swiveling (gimbaling) of the engines to steer the rocket. It feels like being on top of a long weenie that’s being shoved through the sky. There is a lot of swishing air noise as the rocket picks up speed. After the speed becomes supersonic, the swishing air noise and the engine roar suddenly stop, and then you can hear the noises from deep within the rocket, mostly creaks and groans. When the fuel is burned out of the first stage, it is discarded or cut loose by explosives (pyrotechnics). This is really an experience—it sounds like a train wreck. There are banging noises and flashes from the explosives and from the little rocket engines that pull the spent stage away from the tail of the next stage. You can also see a lot of metal pieces flying away and twirling lazily around the rocket. Staging only takes a few seconds, but it seems much longer. Then the engine of the next stage fires, and you’re off toward orbit.

  84. Were you ever really scared?

  An old cliché often quoted by pilots is that “flying consists of hours and hours of boredom interrupted occasionally by moments of stark terror.” I’ve also heard test pilots and astronauts say that they don’t experience fear, merely varying levels of anxiety or apprehension. I think some of them are telling the truth, but I also think they are expressing a distinction between fear and panic. A person can be genuinely afraid but, through discipline, self-control, training, experience, and professional competence, can still function rationally and effectively to cope with problems or emergencies. It is also true that a person can become conditioned to react with some degree of detachment when faced with serious and life-threatening situations, particularly when they occur within the individual’s area of professional expertise. If anyone can claim such self-control, I think it would be experimental test pilots, particularly those that are still around to talk about it. However, I believe anyone is capable of experiencing fear—and a high level of concern for personal safety, prestige, or professional status. The key is to avoid panic at all costs, and this is best achieved by being well trained. Also, I don’t equate excitement with fear. A bit of controlled excitement really gets the mind alert and working.

  85. What is the greatest fear in space?

  The greatest concerns are fire and the loss of air from the spacecraft. We had fire extinguishers on Skylab, and we also had emergency procedures to follow in the event of fire or rapid loss of pressure.

  One day the fire alarm sounded as I was exercising on the bicycle. It was a blood-chilling sound, and I never liked to hear it, even when we were testing the alarm system. It turned out to be a false alarm, but it took me about half an hour to check out everything.

  86. Did you get homesick?

  I didn’t get homesick in the strictest sense, that is, I didn’t fret about it. We all missed familiar faces, but it wasn’t a real psychological or emotional problem because we were so busy. We were also mentally prepared to stay in space for eighty-four days; that was our goal, and we were psychologically oriented to the eighty-four day mission.

  There was also an interesting personal reaction I observed in myself as we neared the end of the eighty-four day mission. There was some consideration of extending our mission for two more weeks. We didn’t hear too much about it on board, but we were unanimously opposed when some veiled suggestions were made. We quickly pointed out that we were out of food, which was technically correct. However, we probably could have used contingency food and scraped together enough spare meals to last two weeks. I remember thinking that extending the mission was a lousy idea. I had stayed up for the agreed-upon time, and that was that. In retrospect, I think my reaction would have been different if the approach had been different and had been made by the right person or if some emergency or operational problem had required it.

  We all missed being around people, particularly family and friends. When we got back, it was very satisfying just to have a lot of different faces around.

  87. What was the hardest thing to get used to?

  The head congestion or stuffiness. This was a minor problem on most space flights, but I seemed to have it a bit worse than my two fellow crew members. In space the sinuses don’t drain as readily as they do on Earth; there’s no post-nasal drip in space.

  88. Didn’t you get bored on such a long mission of eighty-four days?

  We were kept very busy, so boredom wasn’t a problem. I would have really enjoyed having had more time to relax and look out the window at the Earth.

  89. Was it possible to get any privacy?

  Yes, we each had a separate sleep compartment with a fabric door and we would use this to read as well as sleep. Also, Skylab was quite large, so it was possible to get privacy by going to another part of the space station.

  One rather amusing aspect of our sleep compartments was caused by the Velcro strips that latched our doors, which were really fabric sheets, on the sleep compartments. When one of us got up at night to go to the bathroom, we opened the door by pushing open the Velcro strip. It sounded like someone was ripping open a shipping crate, and it frequently awakened the others. One night Jerry woke me, so I got up to look out the window for a few minutes. He was already there; we were over the Pacific Ocean somewhere and finally figured out we were flying over the Society Islands. We saw Tahiti, but it was mostly under clouds. After watching the coast of Chile come up, we gave it up and went back to bed.

  90. How did your crew get along together?

  Just fine. We were usually very busy, and there were so many problems with equipment that we had to help each other often. We had a good team spirit.

  91. Did you ever get mad at each other or have fights or arguments?

  We didn’t have any fights, and there was only one argument that I can recall. It had to do with a change in procedure, and the instructions were very vague. We resolved this by trying the procedure to see if it worked. We never got truly angry at each other, but we were frequently upset with or had disagreements with some people in Mission Control. We were all trying hard to get a job done, so there was probably fault on both sides at one time or another.

  I think I upset Ed Gibson one day by putting his ice cream in the food warmer and leaving his steak in the freezer. I really felt badly about it. He couldn’t eat the steak because it was still
frozen hard, and the ice cream had turned to milk. He had to dig out some contingency food to eat. There wasn’t too much conversation at dinner that night. He salvaged the ice cream by refreezing it. In liquid form it had turned into a big hollow ball. The next day, after it refroze, he stuffed it full of freeze-dried strawberries and had the first strawberry sundae in space.

  92. Are you all still friends?

  Yes.

  93. What would you do if another guy went crazy?

  This is not a silly question. Isolation and confinement can cause severe mental stress in some people, and it’s difficult to predict to whom it will occur and also the extent of irrational behavior. Our crew had talked with an individual who had witnessed one such derangement in an Arctic situation, and he gave us a good idea of the warning signs. There are a lot of symptoms well before the time a person might cause harm to himself or others. The first sign is surliness and a general tendency to be uncooperative; the next is withdrawal from others. After a period of reclusiveness, the person gradually becomes openly antagonistic and aggressive toward others. If I were to have this problem, I would expect the other crewmen to use whatever means available, be it medication or physical force, to control me while preparing to make an emergency/precautionary deorbit and return to Earth.

  94. Did anyone get sick and vomit?

  Yes. I threw up the first day of the flight. This was an unpleasant surprise because, according to tests we took while preparing for our mission, I was the least likely one of our crew to get sick. I used a vomitus bag similar to those available on airlines.

  About one-half of the astronauts feel sick the first few days in space, but after about three days this is no longer a problem.

  95. Were you prepared to take care of medical problems?

  Yes. We had been given limited medical and dental training.

  We had been trained to treat broken bones and sew up cuts. Also, we could talk to doctors on the Earth to get advice. We could have even showed the doctors the problems by using television which we could send down to Earth.

  We could cope with non-serious problems, but in the case of serious injury or illness, we would have given the person emergency treatment and returned to Earth. For example, if a person had an appendicitis attack, we would have given antibiotics to control infection and brought him back at the first good opportunity. We had a heart needle and tracheotome to treat urgent emergencies like cardiac arrest and throat blockage.

  We had a small pharmacy that included decongestants for stuffiness, sleeping pills, motion sickness pills, antibiotics for internal infections, and aspirin for headaches.

  96. How did you know what medicine to use?

  We used our own experience for minor things such as headaches and stuffy heads. For more complicated illnesses, we would have referred to our medical treatment book or consulted with the doctors on Earth.

  97. What would you do if someone got a toothache?

  First, we would have treated it with medication. If that didn’t work, we had all the equipment and training necessary to remove the tooth.

  98. If you cut yourself, would you bleed?

  Yes, you would, but the blood wouldn’t drop off.

  It would collect in a ball over the cut. If there was enough blood, it would just spread out on your skin. We had tissues and bandages to clean and dress any wounds.

  99. Did your position of sleeping, up or down, affect the body fluid shift?

  No. There is no up or down in weightlessness, as far as the body is concerned. The fluid shift we experienced was caused by muscle tension in the legs which caused certain body fluids to move toward the head and upper body. It had nothing to do with our position.

  100. What happens when you sneeze? Would it propel you backward?

  I don’t remember sneezing when I was free to float in reaction to the sneeze. In principle, it could cause a slight rotation backward and/or perhaps a slight upward movement. This is an intriguing question; I wish I had a few minutes back in space to explore the effects of a sneeze.

  101. What could you see? What Earth features show up best?

  Most of the time we saw oceans and clouds, but on almost every orbit we were able to get a good view of some land areas. The Earth features easiest to identify were coastlines, large lakes and rivers, major mountain ranges, and desert regions. Often it was like looking at a map, particularly when looking straight down at cloud-free land surfaces.

  When we looked straight down toward the Earth, we could see a distinctive feature as small as a football field. Color or shading contrast and unusual shapes were particularly helpful in improving our ability to detect and identify features. We were able to see icebergs about a hundred yards in diameter quite easily because of the contrast of white ice with the dark blue sea.

  When we looked at pieces of hardware in space, we were able to see them with much greater clarity because of the absence of air. We noticed this first during launch, when our escape rocket and spacecraft launch cover were jettisoned about fifty miles above the Earth. As the rocket engines pulled the cover off the front and away from our spacecraft, we were able to see an unusual amount of detail in the structure of the cover. It seemed as though we could see every rivet and join-line in it. When we got into orbit and turned around to look at our booster and, later, when we closed in during rendezvous with Skylab, we noticed the same thing—an unusual ability to see minute detail. In fact, objects looked so crisply and sharply defined that we got the impression we were looking at a finely drawn animation display. It was almost unreal.

  102. Could you see … the Great Wall of China?

  Yes, but we had to use binoculars. It wasn’t visible to the unaided eye. The first time I thought I had seen it, I was in error; it was the Grand Canal near Peking. Later, I was able to identify the faint line of the wall, which zigzags in a peculiar pattern across hundreds of miles.

  … the Pyramids?

  No. I was unable to see them even with the binoculars.

  … lightning?

  Yes. It was most spectacular in the equatorial regions where thunderstorms covered thousands of square miles. We could also see lightning in thunderstorms on the horizon over fifteen hundred miles in the distance.

  … the Grand Canyon?

  Yes. It was very easy to see and identify. The colors of the walls of the canyon were quite obvious. After snowfall had covered the northern and southern rims, the colors were most vivid.

  … the Golden Gate Bridge?

  No. We could see San Francisco Bay, but I was unable to see the bridge, even though I knew where it was.

  … the Aswan Dam of Egypt?

  Yes. It’s quite large and stands out clearly against the desert terrain. The Nile River is also very easy to see for the same reason.

  … the “airfields” of ancient astronauts, as popularized in books and television programs?

  No. We examined the Plains of Nazca, at the foot of the Peruvian Andes near the Pacific coast of South America, but were unable to see the patterns in the plains. I took several pictures of this area and there are some very faint patterns—squares with circles inside. This is not similar to any of the patterns shown in aerial photographs of the area.

  … lights at night?

  Yes. In industrialized countries the lights are not only visible but are quite bright. Cities and major highways are very easy to see at night. (See Question 103.)

  … the aurora: northern and southern lights?

  Yes. The aurora was the only Earth feature in which I could detect motion. The aurora patterns are variable and appear as dusky yellow tubes, spikes, sheets, and sprays.

  103. I’ve read that visitors from another world, observing the Earth from several hundred miles up, would see no evidence of man’s presence. What could you see that would indicate the presence of an advanced civilization?

  I believe that statement was originally made after the first pictures of Mars showed no evidence of past or present civilizations, like canal
s or roads or structures. I think the features we saw that gave the clearest evidence of man’s presence on Earth were the lighted cities and highways at night. It is a most impressive sight, and I think they could be seen from great distances out from the Earth. It would be interesting to observe the night side of the Earth from the moon during an Earth eclipse of the moon. This would shield the sun and permit you to look at the full night side of the Earth. I believe it would be possible to recognize North America or Western Europe under favorable weather conditions.

  Other features that might reveal the presence of man, depending on the distance of the observer, would be aircraft contrails, crop and range land patterns, the Suez Canal, reservoirs in desert areas, large airfields, and (alas!) smog pockets.

  104. Is the Earth prettier from space?

  On a Skylab space walk, we could see about sixteen hundred miles to the horizon and had a much wider field of view than when looking through a window from the inside of the spacecraft. We had a good view of about 200,000 square miles (within 45° of vertical) of the Earth’s surface and a clear and unrestricted view of the night sky. The view of the Earth was enthralling, if not downright soul-stirring. Once, when I had just finished passing film out to Jerry Carr who was removing and replacing film in the solar telescopes, I looked down and noticed we were directly above Lake Michigan. I could see the city of Chicago quite clearly because of the cross-hatch pattern created by snow melt on the streets. I looked over to my left and saw the mountains of Montana on the horizon; to my right were the Appalachian Mountains—the scene was breathtaking.

  The view of the Earth was so enticing that I unintentionally caused a problem with the control system of Skylab while I was out on a space walk Christmas Day, 1973. Jerry Carr and I had completed the film magazine retrieval/replacement for the solar telescopes and Jerry had begun a one-man task of repairing a solar telescope filter wheel mechanism. The repair job was taking a long time because the problem wasn’t quite as simple as originally thought. I was stationed at a location where the view wasn’t too good, so I decided to move to the end of the telescope mount where I could see better. It had a good set of foot restraints, and when we stepped into them, the body pointed out from Skylab with the head in a good position to scan the Earth. The view wasn’t good; it was spectacular. I was really having a ball. By leaning around, it was possible to get a view of the entire horizon. It was truly like being on top of the world, and the scene was magnificent. I leaned back and looked over my head, as Jerry had done a few minutes earlier, and got the feeling of falling he had described. It wasn’t a scary feeling, but somewhat like drifting lazily upside-down and watching the world roll by.