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What? So you do not think artists, musicians, inventors, etc are productive? Personally I don't have to use my imagination to see how marvelous our world is. All I have to do is look around me.
Trying too hard to make a point can end up making you look foolish.
First Apollo mission was 8 days.
They had no toilet, like they have now and were in spacesuits.
They are said to have plastic bag taped to buttocks for feces collection and condom type catheter with bag - all inside the space suite - for urine collection.
Average human produces roughly 2 liters of urine a day. Times 8 is 16 liters, or 3 1/2 gallons.
Average human produces about 1 lb of feces per day, times 8 days, 8 lbs.
Set aside inability to wipe oneself, my question is - where did all this go inside the space suite? 3.5 gallons is LARGE volume.
Am I missing something?
yes, of course the main fact. There were no flights.
n reality, using the urine collector didn't work so well. For one thing, it could be painful. If you opened the valve too soon, some part of the mechanism was liable to poke into the end of your penis, which prevented you from urinating. And at that point, as if to confirm your worst fears, the suction began to pull you in. Now you were being jabbed and pulled at the same time, so you shut the valve, and as the mechanism resealed itself it caught a little piece of you in it. It took only one episode like that to convince you to never let it happen again. Next time you had a strategy: start flowing a split-second before you turn on the valve. But once you began to urinate the condom popped off and out came a flurry of little golden droplets at play in the wonderland, floating around and making your misfortune everybody's misfortune! And in no time at all the whole device reeked; it was an affront to the senses just sitting there. The astronauts got used to the urine collector, though, and they got used to mopping up afterwards. But there was no getting used to the other part of the Waste Management System. Tucked away in a strange locker was a supply of special plastic bags, each of which resembled a top hat with an adhesive coating on the brim. Each bag had a finger-shaped pocket built into the side of it. When the call came you had to flypaper this thing to your rear end, and then you were supposed to reach in there through the pocket with your finger---after all, nothing falls in zero gravity---and suddenly you were wishing you had never left home. And after you had it in the bag, so to speak, you had one last delightful task: break open a capsule of blue germicide, seal it up in the bag, and knead the contents to make sure they were fully mixed! At best, the operation was an ordeal. In the confined space of the Apollo command module, your crewmates suffered, too. One of the Apollo 7 astronauts said the smell was so bad it woke him out of a deep sleep. When the crew came back they wrote a memo about it: "Get naked, allow an hour, have plenty of tissues handy."
That is fine. But every picture I see of Apollo mission inside the spacecraft, they have spacesuit on. How do you attach fecal bag IN THAT?
There is something that looks like opening for genitals in the front, I can see how a suction tube may work. But in the rear? And it darn looks like same suite they used in space?
I am still missing something.
They had fecal briefs and these scraps were always in the spacesuit. Dirt Grinder you in is misleading.
A google search on the image brings up details about how it is a "boilerplate", an Apollo test capsule, BP-1227. Basically, an empty shell of a mass and size suitable for testing rocket launches without risking an actual and much more expensive Apollo command capsule. In 1969, it was lost in the Caribbean during testing, recovered by a Soviet spy ship, taken back to Russia, and then turned over to the United States when the USCGC Southwind traveled to Murmansk to pick it up. That exact test capsule now sits outside the Grand Rapids Public Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
No problem in zipping in and out of that for - ehm - practical reasons.
So why full suits at launch? The Apollo craft, in space, wasn't pressurized to one full atmosphere. It had a pure oxygen atmosphere at 5 psi (about 1/3rd of of atmospheric pressure) for safety - Apollo 1 showed the risk of full atmospheric pressure and pure oxygen.
Of course, on Earth, we breathe what is essentially a nitrogen-oxygen mix. What happens if you breathe a nitrogen-rich mixture and are subjected to a drop in pressure? You get the bends, like a scuba diver ascending too fast. To prevent this, the astronauts would be in pressure suits and breathe pure oxygen for hours before start and during start, getting the nitrogen out of their systems.
Of course, during maneuvers like docking/undocking where pressure loss or even forced EVA was a real possibility, pressure suits would come back on.
No problem in zipping in and out of that for - ehm - practical reasons.
So why full suits at launch? The Apollo craft, in space, wasn't pressurized to one full atmosphere. It had a pure oxygen atmosphere at 5 psi (about 1/3rd of of atmospheric pressure) for safety - Apollo 1 showed the risk of full atmospheric pressure and pure oxygen.
Of course, on Earth, we breathe what is essentially a nitrogen-oxygen mix. What happens if you breathe a nitrogen-rich mixture and are subjected to a drop in pressure? You get the bends, like a scuba diver ascending too fast. To prevent this, the astronauts would be in pressure suits and breathe pure oxygen for hours before start and during start, getting the nitrogen out of their systems.
Of course, during maneuvers like docking/undocking where pressure loss or even forced EVA was a real possibility, pressure suits would come back on.
And for an example of when full suits weren't worn and something goes wrong, check out Soyuz 11.
Yep. And mostly because it looked good to have a 3-person capsule.
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