Simulation reveals the complicated way astronauts go to the bathroom in zero gravity

According to astronauts, the main question they get asked about the majestic accomplishment of going to space and being one of the handful of people to leave our planet is how they're able to take a s**t.

Trust people to be brilliant enough to build spaceships and space stations while still being largely concerned with how one uses a bathroom in zero gravity.

Granted, it's actually an important concern for space travel because people do need the loo, so it's just part of life up in space.

Doing without the constant force of gravity does actually make a lot of things much more difficult, as astronauts have found that their muscles wither away and their bone density suffers, while eating and drinking can be more of a problem as well.

Fortunately, for the time when astronauts need to drop a meteor down the bog, there are devices for that.

Go boldly, were no poo has gone before... (NASA)

Given the effects of zero-g on the body, astronauts find they often have to go to the loo a couple of hours after they've left Earth, so the toilet is one of the first things they get to use.

Those brave pioneers instead have to strap themselves to the space toilet and make sure they're tightly positioned so that an airflow can pull their pee and poo away from the body and into containment.

This airflow, which begins when the toilet lid is lifted, also apparently helps with the smells that often come from people using the loo, since it's not like the people on board the International Space Station (ISS) can exactly open a window to dissipate the stench.

There's a funnel for urine while the faeces go right down and anything the astronaut needs to wipe around for clean-up goes into watertight bags and get disposed.

Demonstrating the toilet, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy showed that each astronaut would put a bag to collect the waste in the space toilet and then push it down into a container before replacing it with a new bag to keep everything as contained as possible.

The urine is recycled into usable drinking water again, while the solid waste is loaded into cargo spaceships that supply the ISS and are then burned up in the Earth's atmosphere during re-entry.

Just think about it, a turd could go up into space with an astronaut, get disposed of down the space toilet and then burn up on re-entry, making it a rather intrepid piece of s**t.

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