I’m sure they didn’t store it all up for the return voyage. In fact, in Apollo 13, when Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) flushes his urine out into space, it follows along beside the craft thanks to Newton’s first law of motion. I suspect that other subsequent flushes of bodily functions did the same, until moon orbit whereby said effluent would be grabbed by the moon’s gravity and deposited on the surface.
When parked on the moon they probably just flushed the LEM loo onto the ground, no?
Well, that’s what I’ve thought FOREVER. But the hitchhiking sewage made me think otherwise. Once they went into orbit, that stuff would get captured by the moon and end up on the surface. Unless that part of the movie was factually incorrect.
And if the hitchhiking stuff ended up on the moon, then there’s no reason not to dump the rest of it.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but in general, if you’re coming from a higher altitude and want to end up in orbit around an object (say, the Moon), the most efficient way to do it is to aim yourself at a point some altitude above the surface of the Moon. You then fire your retro-rockets to slow yourself down by the right amount when you’re at your lowest altitude, and you end up in orbit at that altitude. If you don’t fire your retro-rockets, you’ll whip around the Moon and sail back out to higher altitudes; what you won’t do (unless you’re over-eager with firing your retro-rockets) is crash into the surface. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that this is the trajectory that any waste ejected during the Earth-Moon transit would have taken, since frozen urine doesn’t have retro-rockets to fire.
kenobi 65 took poo, so that leaves me with pee. Let’s take Apollo 11 for our example because it’s probably the best documented online. The other Apollo missions may have better records, but they aren’t as easily available.
They actually had orders not to dump urine from the time the Lunar Module separated to the time it rendezvoused with the Command Module, but things didn’t go according to plan. The plan was to jettison waste water just after lunar orbit had been established. 84 hours into the mission. Unfortunately the urine storage facility leaked and pee got into the Lunar Module. From the official mission transcript, as captured by the onboard voice recorder.
Then they bagged everything while they were in the Lunar Module and took it with them back to the command module. The next reference to a dump of waste water in the transcript is nearly a day after lunar lift-off, just before leaving lunar orbit, and again they’re having problems.
They ended up taking it home with them, and finding a creative way to re-arrange stuff to make room for the bag.
So did some of the stuff they dumped in orbit make it to the surface? Almost certainly, but even without that we know waste is on the moon. The breakdown of the equipment makes it almost certain that when sections of the lunar lander were left on the surface that some of those lovely urine globules they were talking about, and possibly other waste, given the terrible procedure required to extract poop it’s almost certain some escaped the bags, which contaminated the LM are still there.
That’s funny. Apparently Adobe tries to do OCR on the docs it scanned for NASA and some of the translations don’t work so well. I did a lot of cleanup of their character recognition. Here’s what the first section would have looked like as a straight copy-paste
The poor person who had to transcribe this recording had it worse than me though. It looks like a bunch of stuff where they talk about bodily functions was excised or simply not transcribed. I’m sure a lot of it was simply unintelligible as well. The legend for the document had categories for “unknown crewmember” and “multiple speakers” where a voice may be audible but not identifiable and times when everyone was talking over each other.
In Andrew Chaikin’s wonderful book A Man on the Moon - The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, he mentioned that after their historic moonwalk, Aldrin and Armstrong depressurized the LM one more time so they could throw out their backpacks and another bag of gear that was no longer needed.
He didn’t go into detail about what exactly that bag contained, and I can’t find mention of this in the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Chaikin didn’t say it was trash, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they threw out used food containers. Not poop, but still organic material.
On Skylab the astronauts freeze dried and brought back just about everything that came out of their bodies in order to study long term space flight on human physiology. The third crew even got in trouble when they tried to cover up the fact that one of them had vomited. I don’t know if the Apollo crews brought back their solid waste for similar reasons.
So if faeces was left on the moon; it could (bearing in mind that there are extremophile bacterias on Earth) , eventually evolve into weird mutant monsters; that would develop their own incredibly advanced, but alien civilisation, that would in turn invade our planet and turn us all into their sexual playthings ?
What about just on the bottom of their boots and whatnot. Wouldn’t there be microscopic bacteria that could possibily survive on the moon (and then of course evolve, fly to earth, and rape our women)?
OK, so feces may have been stored. But again, what about the urine-dump that hitchhiked along beside the service module. It would have to end up on the moon post-orbit, right?
From a thread a while back. Somewhere in there I think it mentions that the Moon was to be kept free of human contamination. The LM had a urine collection tank in its descent stage that got left on the Moon, but nothing actually got ‘dumped’ on the surface.
Personally I think that was kind of stupid. The Moon was a wasteland. A rock. You couldn’t contaminate it if you tried. The astronauts probably thought so too. They hated the whole ‘Lunar Receiving Lab’ isolation trailer they had to stay in for two weeks after they got back. So much so that NASA eventually stopped using it. Not a lot of ‘Moon germs’ to worry about…
:eek: