Poop on the Moon: The Excrement of Apollo Astronauts

One of the most frequent questions astronauts receive is how do they go to the bathroom. Today they enjoy various suction-based solutions, but during the Apollo program era, all their "biological commitments" had to be stored in bags and containers.

This means that the astronauts of the lunar missions left urine and feces on the surface of our satellite. The scientific interest in this material is very great, and for good reason: after 50 years of exposure to the hostility of space, they want to know whether anything alive remains in those bags.

Waste on the Moon

More than half a century since man's arrival on the Moon, that small step for man... which by the way is still "small", because beyond the Apollo program itself, we never returned to deep space. However, in recent times we have noticed a change of vision.

There are many reasons to return to our satellite, and the preparation for the trip to Mars appears at the top of the list, but there are some scientists who propose the recovery of a very special material: excrement

Yes, the excrement and urine that the Apollo astronauts abandoned on the Moon. The official information available speaks of 96 bags with urine, feces and vomit belonging to the participants of the six Apollo missions (11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17). The storage systems used were uncomfortable, and above all, unpleasant.

The so-called "absorption garment" was nothing more than a glorified diaper with a capacity of 900 milliliters, while the "fecal collection device" was a bag with adhesive tape that astronauts had to stick to their posteriors, using a (covered) finger as a reference to place it correctly in front of the anus and send the discharge to the bottom of the bag (remember, almost zero gravity).

Now... why? What is interesting about a pile of poop on the Moon? The answer is life. 55 percent of human excrement is composed of bacteria. The astronauts' bags could provide access to an experiment that has been active for so many decades.

Is anything alive in those bags, or did the combination of radiation and extreme temperatures kill everything? Another detail against the possibility of "fecal life" is that the astronauts poured germicides into the bags to neutralize the content. Even so, experts insist that it is worth making the attempt.

Source: Vox