In addition to creating the beloved role-playing series Ultima, Richard "Lord British" Garriott has been to outer space and discussed the unpleasant experience of pooping in zero gravity many miles away from Earth.
On the latest episode of our interview show IGN Unfiltered, Garriott noted that while books have been written how to go to the bathroom in space, they've always detailed the way you're trained to go in space, and no one as far as he knows tells the "actual story of how troubling it is to go to the bathroom in space."
The bathroom itself is like "small telephone booth" with one receptacle for liquid waste, another for solid waste, and several of knobs and switches that are fairly difficult to use thanks to the lack of gravity. "It's a funnel you pee into for liquid waste, which works fine and that's easy, but the solid waste receptacle is the problem," he said.
Garriott described the solid waste receptacle as "basically a beer keg bolted to the floor with a shoebox-size toiled seat with a lid and a receptacle about the size of your water bottle that fits down inside of it with a plastic bag with a rubber band that holds it at the top. The plastic bag goes down into the shoebox and has perforations in the bottom, and the same vacuum hose that could have peed into is attached to it."
In space your GI tract slows down, so you don't have to go to the bathroom as often, but when you, you're backed up after having not gone in several days, and thus have a lot to excrete. Since there's no gravity, it doesn't simply break off as you're excreting the waste over the toilet. Garriott likened it to squeezing a tube of toothpaste in zero gravity, saying, "if I try to move the toothpaste tube away from the toothpaste, the toothpaste comes with it. And so when you sit over this container and begin to go to the bathroom, you quickly create a column to the bottom of the bag. And if you try to continue it sort of spreads out on your backside."
As a solution to this unpleasant and messy problem, Garriott said everyone reacts by giving "a bounce, because that tends to break things, like shaking the toothpaste off the tube." However, that doesn't resolve the issue but instead creates "an obstruction in the bag, and so you start again but now you have the same problem happening but even sooner."
While you could clean up using baby wipes and start again with a fresh bag, you'd end up going through "dozens of bags and use up the supply on the space station." Since that's not a feasible option, you realize you need to "put on rubber gloves, get out some wet wipes and sort of manually manipulate things out of the way to continue," a process that Garriott said takes "like 45 minutes."
He went on to note how "hilarious" it is that "no one ever talks about it" and that "no one's made a better toilet," adding, "after years and years and millions and millions of dollars being spent on toilets, I could go on about the pantheon of toilets that have been invented for space and they are all worse than the one I described." Garriott then concluded by saying that during his time in space, "I think I made three solid waste deposits, and that was enough."
For more fascinating stories from the brilliant mind behind the Ultima series, stay tuned for the first part of our IGN Unfiltered conversation with Garriott, which goes live tomorrow.
Alex Osborn is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his YouTube channel.
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