How Astronauts Go to the Bathroom in Outer Space

There are a lot of challenges involved in putting humans in space. Not the least of which is figuring out how they will go to the bathroom. NASA has been dealing with this, with more or less success, ever since the first space missions. Even before the space age, the military’s U-2 program faced this challenge. These long-distance reconnaissance planes fly at 70,000 feet. This means the pilots must wear partially pressurized suits. In-flight peeing was, in the early days, managed by an in-suit catheter, inserted into the then-exclusively-male pilots’ penises and threaded into their bladders. The urine was siphoned out of the bladder and into a bag. It worked. But, as you can imagine, the pilots didn’t think it was the ideal solution. NASA came up with a better solution for space flights, but it took them a while to get this right.