I was listening to a program on NPR this morning and it was pointed out that nearly every spacecraft since the start of the space program has been designed so that the astronauts’ excrement was dumped into space. Its still out there, floating around, according to the show. What the show didn’t mention, that I find mind bendingly funny is that the possiblity exists (though exceedingly remote) that one day life might form on a planet thanks to the organic matter contained in some astronaut’s shit that just happened to find its way safely to the surface at just the right moment!
The orbit will eventaually decay (if you’ll pardon the expression) and said excretement will burn up upon rentry.
I’m NOT going to click “email notification”…
Actually CP, I suspect that, during the Apollo missions, midpoint between the Earth and moon the gravity would be so miniscule that the decompression “flush” would send the, er, ‘waste’ off into the ether.
((Waiting for Bad Astronomer to embarrass me.))
Right, waste from low-orbit spacecraft (pretty much all manned spacecraft except the Apollo) would decay in a matter of months and burn up in the atmosphere. The midpoint between earth and moon is still deep inside the gravitational well of the earth/moon system, so normally things put there won’t get expelled. Though with chaotic orbits, it’s not impossible.
But we have sent many probes to other planets. It’s entirely possible some of them were contaminated with bacteria, and ended up polluting other planets. Nowadays NASA is very careful about sterilizing those probes, but it hasn’t always been the case. It’s used in several sci-fi I’ve read.
Of course, if our waste can evolve into an eco-system, then we might have evolved from someone else’s waste landing on earth 3 billion years ago.
Gotta admit, it’d explain a lot. 
Aww crap… if that was true I’d be really pissed off!
waits for rimshot, then leaves stage
So does this mean one should no longer take offense to being called “A piece of shit”?
Maybe poop exposed to cosmic radiation could be a good thing for the environment. I mean, look what wonders Martian excriment did for the country bumpkins in Spaced Invaders.
I thought solid waste was stored and returned to Earth, as freeze-dried poop could pose a collision hazard with satellites or other spacecraft.