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"There are no space toilets because NASA never wanted to send people to the moon in 1969."
NASA's official Weibo post said that the restart of the manned lunar landing program, now called Artemis, will soon send humans to the moon again.
These astronauts will carry out a series of tasks such as rock collection on the lunar surface, exploration of underground resources, and even establish a lunar base on the lunar surface.
However, one of the more important tasks is to bring back to Earth 96 bags of diapers from orbit around the moon and study the microbial changes in them.
These diapers came from the astronauts who participated in the Apollo moon landing program 50 years ago, and they didn't want to get diapers on the moon, but NASA lacked space toilets at that time, so they had to choose this way to solve it.
So it's very likely that these diapers will survive on the moon, and NASA is eager to see how the microbes and organisms in them have changed in the face of extreme environments in the past 50 years.
1. How diapers are produced.
If there were any containers in the return capsule of the Apollo moon landing and other manned spacecraft, it was more likely that these things were dropped on the moon, and the greatest probability was that the wives of the chaff who were too frightened to pull or fall...
The reason for this is the lack of space toilets, and they don't even deserve simple urine bags.
The roots of this problem can be traced back to 1949, when NASA was founded, when there were not even flight capsules, let alone space toilets.
And when the House of Representatives passed a resolution that NASA's budget would be multi-million dollars the following year, it seemed that there would be a large wave of space probes and launches, but NASA officials did not think so.
They believe that the money should be used to develop space exploration technology, not to build space probes, so NASA officials spent weeks in office sorting through previous space programs and writing their own proposals, which also mentioned manned rockets for the first time.
T. Keith Glennan and U.S. Air Force Colonel Thomas Glennan in 1958 as NASA leaders. D. White worked together to develop an overarching framework for a manned spacecraft project, which he named Project Apollo.
However, in 1960, when US President John F. Kennedy said to Congress that he would "propose a manned landing on the moon within 10 years this year", no one cared about the issue of toilets in the capsule, probably because no official would raise this embarrassing issue with his boss or Congress.
Second, there is a lack of space toilets.
By 1962, some rules about space toilets had been added to the SP-6 manual, but this regulation only divided the toilets in the capsule into two types and explained the differences between the two types of toilets.
After the successful conclusion of the Apollo 1 mission in 1968, a series of satellite news magazines were launched on the NASA website, including an issue detailing how astronauts went to the toilet in space.
The astronauts have a small, light ammonia toilet in the armor of the loading module, through which the astronaut pushes out a small tube that is attached to the finger through a small hole in the screen and uses it to go to the toilet.
If it is a small noodle, push a small straw out of the small hole and look at the toilet below to suck; If it's a pee trumpet, you can push the trumpet directly down and the pee will be caught directly in the swirling foil.
However, in 1964, after the official launch of the Apollo program, NASA engineers found that when assembling the capsule, there were gaps between each layer of aluminum foil, and these gaps could cause urine or feces to enter and clog the entire excretory system.
To solve this problem, the NASA team had to disassemble and repair the capsule, but NASA did not have enough time and resources at the time, so it had to put the problem aside and even not install the toilet altogether.
So when the Apollo 11 mission was about to fly in 1969, the astronauts had to start thinking about how to use the toilet in the capsule.
Eventually, female scientists, astronauts, and astronauts' wives in the U.S. gave their advice to use urine bags until the spacecraft regained its atmosphere, so as to avoid being sprayed with urine when the spacecraft was flowing backwards into the atmosphere.
On the moon, the same is done, where astronauts craze urine bags and other items that have been used for 24 hours or more into a very small space in the spacecraft, but as for the feces, they can only be treated with static electricity as much as possible.
3. The U.S. space program has postponed its return to the moon.
Of course, when NASA announced its return to the moon, China's mainland astronauts had just completed the mission of space exploration and had entered the third stage, which is called the "Chang'e era".
During the "Chang'e Era", the mainland will launch a number of lunar exploration missions such as Chang'e-3, Chang'e-4, Chang'e-5, Chang'e-6, Chang'e-7, and Chang'e-8, among which Chang'e-4 has achieved a historic soft landing on the far side of the moon.
The second phase of Chang'e-5 will be the first time that the mainland will bring lunar samples back to Earth, and it is planned to sample them on the Moon in December 2020 and bring them back to Earth for research.
In the third stage, the mainland will establish a lunar scientific research station and stay on the moon for a long time, which is also the most significant lunar exploration program of the mainland so far.
According to relevant information, the mainland will hold advanced demonstration activities for manned lunar landing around 2030.
It is worth noting, however, that the U.S. mission to return to the moon is not the first time NASA has launched, but in 2017, President Trump announced the start of the re-entry program.
The U.S. plan was to complete the return mission around 2028, but Trump has advanced the entire mission by four years, which is also a headache for NASA, because the U.S. rocket technology has fallen far behind the technology of the 60s in the past two years.
And shortly before the announcement of the return to the moon by the United States, Russia had completed the rocket mission to carry astronauts into orbit, while the United States was still in the stage of losing ground.
Therefore, NASA believes that it is necessary to step up the construction of space probes, especially manned rockets, in order to achieve the realization of sending astronauts to the moon by 2024, and establish a regular residency mechanism in the next few years.
epilogue
The diapers in the Apollo program can not only detect whether harmful microorganisms are alive in them, but more importantly, they are of great significance for the limits and adaptability of life, and will play an important role in future deep space exploration.
In future manned landing missions, the United States will even be able to make a toilet that can burn feces to ashes with only electricity, and even charge for it, which will be a big profit.
At the same time, competition and cooperation between the United States and China in lunar exploration will also advance the field of space exploration, which may lead to more scientific discoveries and technological innovations.