4 April—One of the more memorable plot lines on The Big Bang Theory many years ago involved Howard’s imperfect design of a toilet for the International Space Station, which necessitated his taking a trip to fix it and thus becoming an Astronaut. A toilet? Not just a toilet, mind you, a space toilet intended for use in what’s called zero gravity, thus imposing a number of necessities, as it were, not incumbent on earthbound sanitary fixtures.

(Older readers may remember when the very word “toilet” was not used in polite society. In fact, I remember watching Follow That Man in the early 1950s at my grandparents’ place as my father’s mother prepared the Passover seder, wherein private detective Mike Barnett [played by Ralph Bellamy] referred to “a certain piece of bathroom furniture.” I can’t remember anything about the seder, of course. And in those days “pregnant” also was verboten.)

It’s likely The Big Bang Theory’s writers came up with the idea of a toilet for its comedy/snicker value. But funny as the subject of Howard’s toilet may have seemed, imagine being toiletless. Okay, you chuckle, there’s always an old-fashioned privy. And in a real emergency the squat—the anatomically preferable position for people as well as so-called lower animals, as it happens—never fails.

But when there’s no effective gravity, only micro-gravity—because gravity extends everywhere in the universe, however weak it may be at any distance from a gravitating body—to direct the flow of bodily waste, you want to separate that waste from your body for any number of hygienic and other reasons.

That’s why NASA has spent some $30 million taxpayer dollars on what it calls the Universal Waste Management System (UWMS) and touts as “a leap forward in deep space toilet technology.” The UWMS is the certain piece of bathroom furniture on the Orion spacecraft, currently in transit to circle around the moon as the Artemis II flight. In a first for a spaceship, Orion’s UWMS is mounted in its own private cubicle. Is that privy progress or is that privy progress?

A problem with the UWMS was deftly repaired by Astronaut Christina Koch, with DIY instruction from a plumber at Ground Control. Howard didn’t have to be sent up to fix it.

Incidentally, on the Artemis II mission, urine is being vented out of Orion every day and solid waste is being stored in a collection receptacle to be disposed of on return to Earth. Can’t you see Trump confiscating the space turds and giving them to his evil spawn by executive order, having them gold-plated, then signing them and selling them as collectibles?