Space toilets are one of those things that are both critical and ignored in most depictions of space. Even in all the years of Star Trek they have "sonic showers" , but never depict a toilet.
It's amazing that NASA publishes this data in real time.
> Space toilets are one of those things that are both critical and ignored in most depictions of space. Even in all the years of Star Trek they have "sonic showers" , but never depict a toilet
Why would they? They have artificial gravity everywhere and iirc it’s never failed like every other piece of technology when the plot demands it. The toilets wouldn’t look any different, except maybe the ones to accommodate non-human species (THAT would be interesting). Star Trek elides a lot of things that would otherwise be boring because “post-nuclear war Utopia solved it.”
Evacuation is only interesting in zero-G. Although to be fair I don’t remember the expanse or most other hard scifi touching on the topic.
I suddenly realize, though, that I can't ever remember seeing a bathroom door anywhere on any USS Enterprise or similar.
Like, wouldn't there be one tucked away in a back corner of the bridge, or a corner of a room or passage adjoining the bridge? Shouldn't we see a bathroom door, or at least the open entrance to a "bathroom corridor", as the characters do a walk-and-talk down the hallways?
And then... regular TV shows show women putting on or taking off their makeup in the bathroom mirror, people having a conversation through the shower door, someone in a stall overhearing a conversation by the sink... has Star Trek ever shown that?
What the heck does a bathroom look like on Star Trek? And the bathroom signage?
There is a bathroom door off the Enterprise-D bridge labeled HEAD. And the official deck plans have a second bathroom off of Picard’s ready room. But those are the only official ones.
The Battlestar Galactica reboot had a few scenes in the locker room/shower/toilet area. Pretty spartan, but probably familiar to anyone who served on a navy ship.
I remember one Star Trek writer theorizing that the Klingons were so cranky because they never put toilets in their ships.
I loved Babylon 5. One minor reason was because a scene was filmed in a restroom. With ultraviolet lights used in place of water for the handwashing. A sign that the characters are living in The Future. Showrunner J Michael Straczynski did this specifically as a small dig against Star Trek.
My understanding is the waste gets resequenced and used to create other items.
* Enterprise - S1E8 Breaking the Ice
> Tucker: The first thing you've got to understand is we recycle pretty much everything on a starship. That includes waste, and the first thing that happens to the waste is it gets processed through a machine called a bio-matter resequencer. Then it gets broken down into.
> So the waste is broken down into little molecules and then they get transformed into any number of things we can use on the ship. Cargo containers, insulation, boots, you name it.
* Discovery - S3E12 There is a tide...
> Admiral Charles Vance: It's made of our shit, you know.
> That's the base material that we use in our replicators. We deconstruct it to the atomic level and then reform the atoms.
Having spent an uncomfortable and expensive night in a foreign hospital after creating my own personal fatberg, this sounds like a technological innovation that would bring tears of joy rather than stress to my eyes.
Isn't it a joke in Space Cowboys, where Tommy Lee Jones inspects a gadget and one of the young astronauts tell him it's the "ACM - Asshole Centering Monitor"
https://bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/Wolowitz_Zero-Gravity_...
Space toilets are one of those things that are both critical and ignored in most depictions of space. Even in all the years of Star Trek they have "sonic showers" , but never depict a toilet.
It's amazing that NASA publishes this data in real time.