Blogs / 80beats

The toilet on the International Space Station was finally fixed yesterday, provoking a sigh of relief from astronauts and a wave of giggles from the earthlings here below.

The zero-gravity toilet broke two weeks ago, and couldn’t be fixed until the space shuttle Discovery arrived at the station with a load of spare parts.

Discovery had a trip to the station scheduled anyway, to deliver a $1 billion science lab that’s now the largest component of the station. But while mission command may have hoped to use the shuttle’s trip to educate the public on zero-gravity science experiments, the emergency toilet repair took the spotlight instead.

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The space shuttle Discovery docked at the International Space Station this afternoon, two days after its launch through cloudless Florida skies on Saturday. But before the shuttle cozied up to the station and threw open the doors, the pilot guided the shuttle in an elegant backflip, allowing the station’s astronauts to photograph the Discovery’s belly to check for damage.

This maneuver has become standard over the past five years. However, NASA engineers are particularly eager to get these photos back, because several pieces of foam insulation fell from the shuttle during its launch.

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If the shuttle Discovery blasts off as planned this Saturday, it will deliver a $1 billion science lab to the International Space Station, where astronauts will be able to use furnaces to grow crystals and bio-chambers to grow cells.

But the space lab isn’t the shuttle’s only precious cargo. It will also carry spare parts to allow astronauts to fix their malfunctioning space toilet.

News of the broken space toilet has captivated the earth-bound masses, as people imagine, with horror, being confronted with a balky toilet in a zero gravity environment. NASA has admitted that the toilet broke last Wednesday, when the fan-and-vacuum system that sucks away liquid waste stopped working.

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