@ai6yr
The things they never taught us in school about the 1969 space flights 😔

'“Give me a napkin, quick,” Stafford was recorded saying a few minutes before Cernan spots more: “Here’s another goddamn turd.” '

@ai6yr @me_valentijn Our flight had rats and monkeys in cages built by Lockheed, where gross assumptions were made without evidence in reality.

Because of the risk of herpes, present in every set of lab monkeys they had wanted to use, the crew was naturally upset. The air and water is recirculated in space.

Come flight, and the crew had skipped our flight training for how to handle the food dispensers and waste trays. Theory was, you had an extra plastic bag to hold the old stuff. You put the extra bag up to the slot where the food/waste was, and pushed a button (which was essentially a shotgun firing mechanism). Out would come the bad old stuff into the bag, which you'd close with a wire tie.

I was watching. The extra bag confused them. They took the new thing and pulled it from its bag, then floating. Pow! They pushed the first button. Zip! Out came bits of food, the dehydrated food bar that was never replaced after NASA delayed our flight so the Pentagon could launch a toy.

From the cockpit: "We can smell it up here."

Then came the first waste tray.

Now, Lockheed assumed 2 things. 1) than animals will never pee into the wind, and 2) that the wind from the fan in the cage was swift enough to cause even waste distribution across the waste tray.

The rats, not tethered, spun in circles in weightlessness as their legs kept trying to run. The window into that cage was covered in rat pee. They peed in all directions, wind be damned.

So, the first assumption was bogus. What about the second?

The astronauts pushed that fateful button to release the first waste tray. Bits of poop began floating. Now wiser, but still not following printed instructions, they had a vacuum cleaner to grab what turned out to be a lot of poop.

From the cockpit: "WE CAN SMELLLL IT UP HERE!"

Yeah. Poop in space. Good times.