What Gets Left Out

NASA’s fecal containment bag. Astronauts are true heroes.

One of the saddest things about writing nonfiction is that you just can’t fit all the cool stuff you find into one book. Thankfully, we have blogs for this sort of thing.

I’ve been hard at work on my biography of Neil Armstrong. Apollo 11 has just achieved the first moon landing and Neil, Buzz, and Mike are on their way back to Earth. But I only had a limited amount of words to describe this epic achievement, and one of the things that got cut for space was the fact that there were no bathrooms on any of the Apollo flights.

So of course you want to know how this was handled, don’t you? Alas, I do mean handled.

In classic NASA speak, the astronauts used “fecal containment bags.” Sad to say, they were not terribly well designed and sometimes did not do what they were supposed to do, leading to this immortal dialog, captured for history in the transcripts for Apollo 10 as it orbited the moon:

Commander Tom Stafford: Oh — who did it?

Command Module Pilot John Young:  Who did what?

Lunar Module Pilot Eugene Cernan: Where did that come from?

Stafford: Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air.

Young: I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine.

Cernan: I don’t think it’s one of mine.

Stafford: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away.

A bit later on the same mission:

Cernan: They told us that–Here’s another *$*#@*@*#*$ turd. What’s the matter with you guys?

Stafford and Young: laughter

Cernan: A line of dialog which I shall omit, as I try to keep this blog rated PG-13 

Stafford: It was just floating around?

Cernan: Yes.

Stafford: Mine was stickier than that.

Young: Mine was too. It hit that bag–

Cernan: When I stuck my finger in mine–mine was too soft. [The fecal containment bags had a “finger cot,” a sort of indentation where fingers could be inserted to, erm, encourage separation of the matter in question from the buttocks, as there was no gravity to help with this. Cernan was not actually sticking his naked finger in, you know.)

Young; Laughter

Cernan: I don’t know whose that is. I can neither claim it nor disclaim it.

I tell you, the stuff you can’t include in books just breaks your heart.