The true final frontier

NASA has a new mission for anyone looking to leave their mark on the next stage of space travel: intergalactic plumbing. Specifically, they are offering $30,000 to solve what they’re calling The Space Poop Challenge: can you figure out a way to deal with the intestinal refuse of an astronaut who may be stuck in their suit for up to six days?

How to drop a deuce in space remains one of the true final frontiers. Over a century of sci-fi imaginings, we have wondered what it would be like to walk on other planets, considered the implications of meeting alien cultures, even pondered what it might be like to bend the very rules of space and time themselves, but never much thought has gone into where we might do our business. As it stands, we know considerably more about how an alien pupae may emerge from our chests than how a mix of protein gruel may emerge from our anus.

I suppose it’s because the easy answer here is just “flush it into space,” but that does leave out some of the trickier implications of treating the entire cosmos like a pit toilet. Now, maybe your faster-moving ships – your Millennium Falcons and your Enterprises – can just hyperspace/ warp their way to a cleaner corner of the galaxy, but what about your slow-moving, or even entirely stationary, space stations? Did the Death Star leave a skid-mark across the Core Worlds on its way to blowing up Alderaan? What did Deep Space 9 do with its voluminous wastes? Were the Cardassians so snarly because the Federation had been using the wormhole as an interstellar outhouse for most of the 24th century?

If these grand questions are beyond even the imaginations of people who can dream up alien creatures that defy physics, though, there are smaller, practical considerations, too. Those Star Trek: Next Generation jumpsuits would seem to imply that either every trip to the loo is a full-naked affair, or humanity figured out warp drive well before the intra-suit pooping system. This doesn’t even get into the complicated biologies of our extraterrestrial friends: do Klingons have ridged rear ends?

Perhaps if our distinguished creators had bothered to think about these kinds of questions, NASA wouldn’t be in quite the pickle it is now. The unfortunate truth is that if we’re ever going to get beyond the stars, we have a lot of crap to figure out first.