Orbital Crapper

In space, no one can hear you scream...but they can hear you fart.

The master bathroom for three astronauts aboard the International Space Station is on the fritz again as a trio of new spaceflyers join the orbiting lab, NASA officials said. Couple that with a temporary telemetry glitch that also sent the space station into a so-called survival mode and lead to system power downs for several hours, and you've got fun fun fun! That issue was quickly tracked to an electronics box aboard the station, but the balky space toilet in the Russian Zvezda service module continues to plague astronauts and flight controllers (but mostly the astronauts).

Russian specialists are troubleshooting, but he problem appears to be a gas separator issue. Really. It's a familiar problem for space station commander Sergei Volkov and flight engineers Oleg Kononenko and Greg Chamitoff - a similar glitch knocked the space toilet out of commission in June, leading Russian engineers to rush a spare gas-liquid separator assembly pump to Florida, where it was packed aboard the shuttle Discovery and launched to the orbiting laboratory. Volkov and Kononenko resuscitated the ailing space toilet during Discovery's last mission, which also delivered the massive Japanese Kibo laboratory and ferried Chamitoff to join the crew. The space station's Russian toilet uses fans and airflow in place of gravity to collect solid and liquid waste for disposal. The gas-liquid separator is part of the liquid waste system. It weighs about 35 pounds and is about 1.5 feet long and 8 inches wide and tall - not that those specs matter to you, but in case you wanted to know in case you're building your own ISS.

NASA has paid $19 million for a second Russian-built space toilet, which will be delivered alongside other life support, exercise equipment and sleeping quarters during a November shuttle mission. Having two working main toilets is "vital "for the space station, which is expected to double its crew size to six astronauts next year.