Artemis II’s toilet is a moon mission milestone | Scientific American

April 1, 2026

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Artemis II’s toilet is a moon mission milestone

On their voyages to the moon, NASA’s astronauts are finally getting some creature comforts of terrestrial toilets—such as having a door and being able to pee and poop simultaneously

By K. R. Callaway edited by Lee Billings

The lunar-bound astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission will go boldly where none have gone before, thanks to the space agency’s first-ever flight of a functional toilet around the moon.

NASA/Bill Ingalls

NASA is gearing up to launch four astronauts on a pioneering journey around the moon—the Artemis II mission. Follow our coverage here.

When astronauts first made their way to the moon, they did so without a toilet. The Apollo program’s system of plastic bags and funnels was so unwieldy and messy that crew members found it “objectionable” and “distasteful,” according to a subsequent NASA report. But now, more than a half century since the last crewed lunar voyages and their toilet troubles, the four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission will take flight with a more commodious bathroom in tow.

The space agency’s Universal Waste Management System (UWMS)—more colloquially called just “the toilet”—was created to solve longstanding potty problems faced by astronauts and to offer a more familiar bathroom experience on the final frontier. Lunar astronauts will now be spoiled by amenities that include handles to help them stay steady in microgravity, a system that can handle both urine and feces simultaneously, urine-collection devices that work for both male and female astronauts, and even a door for the helpful illusion of privacy in a cramped crew capsule.

The new design is more than a decade in the making. Space infrastructure company Collins Aerospace first entered into a contract with NASA to develop the project in 2015. In that time, project scientists have overcome fundamental issues with past space toilets while imagining and meeting future needs so that the same system used by Artemis II astronauts could be adapted for moon and Mars missions in decades to come.

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“I think of waste management as an evolution of design,” says Melissa McKinley, project manager and principal investigator for NASA’s UWMS team. “The toilet has built on designs from Apollo, the space shuttle and even the International Space Station.... There is so much learning that goes into it.”

In the tight quarters of Apollo crew capsules, astronauts strapped adhesive-rimmed plastic bags and tubes to themselves whenever they had to defecate or urinate. Attaching the awkward bags was difficult enough in weightless conditions, but the astronauts also had to manually mix in a packet of germicide to prevent the buildup of bacteria and gases within the sealed bag.

The system was infamously prone to leaks, such as during the Apollo 10 mission, when astronauts noticed “a turd floating through the air,” and during the Apollo 8 mission, when the crew had to chase down blobs of vomit and feces that escaped into the cabin. A NASA report released after the end of the Apollo missions noted that waste disposal “must be given poor marks” when it comes to crew satisfaction.

“I used to want to be the first man to Mars,” said astronaut Ken Mattingly during the Apollo 16 mission, after describing the system. “This has convinced me that, if we got to go on Apollo, I ain’t interested.”

Based on these scathing reviews, NASA scientists knew they had to create a more streamlined system. After all, “the toilet is a ‘mission-critical’ system, so if it breaks down, the whole mission is in jeopardy,” says David Munns, a science and technology historian at the City University of New York.

This version of NASA’s Universal Waste Management System was sent to the International Space Station; a special lunar version will accompany the space agency’s Artemis astronauts onboard Orion spacecraft bound for the moon.

NASA/JSC/James Blair

So before the space shuttle program, they engineered a toilet that could work in a low-gravity environment. It looked much like a typical terrestrial toilet but required the astronauts to strap in and use a vacuum hose to prevent waste from floating back up into the spacecraft.

Early toilets on both the space shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS) used this vacuum system—with the key difference being that the ISS model recycled some wastewater, whereas the space shuttle’s version vented it int