The Orion spacecraft is now much closer to the Moon than Earth on its 10-day journey into deep space and back, and overall everything is going smashingly well. Things are going so well that, during the daily mission briefings at Johnson Space Center in Houston, there’s just not that much of substance to talk about. So the discourse keeps coming back to, of all things, the toilet on board Orion.

As you may recall, there were some toilet problems in the initial hours of the mission. During the initial checkout of spacecraft systems, Orion's toilet was supposed to be “wetted” with water to prime the pump. Not enough water was introduced, so the pump was non-responsive. Once more water was added, it began functioning fine. It was a minor blip, but the Internet went crazy for crap for about 24 hours.

A new problem emerged by Friday night. Urine is collected in a small tank, about the size of an office trash can. From there it is supposed to be vented into space, which is to say dumped overboard to sail around the cosmos until the end of time. However, flight controllers noted that astronaut pee had frozen in the tank. There were no issues with using the toilet for number 2, but number 1 was a no-go.

To address the problem Orion was maneuvered into an orientation such that the urine tank and vent lines received the maximum amount of sunshine to un-freeze the urine. This helped a little bit, but did not entirely solve the problem. So for now, the astronauts are continuing to pee into, essentially, bags.