All important space toilet integral part of new Smithsonian space shuttle exhibits
Leave it to the Smithsonian to get every detail right when laying out new exhibits.
First, as part of the Space Shuttle Discovery’s exhibit at its new home in the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia will be the spacecraft’s original space toilet or waste containment system as it is more technically known.
More: NASA Space Shuttle Discovery’s spectacular final flight
And a new exhibit in the Smithsonian’s iconic Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC has its own space toilet demonstration, albeit apparently a reproduction.
Tim Grove is Chief of Education for the Museum in Washington, DC on the museum’s AirSpace blog writes:
The [Smithsonian’s] Education staff has decided to seize a teachable moment. The new Moving Beyond Earth exhibition will feature a full-scale reproduction space shuttle mid-deck, the shuttle’s living quarters. Visitors will be able to open some of the lockers, look out the portal for a heavenly view, and yes, see a reproduction space toilet, or WCS (waste containment system). And, in case you were wondering, our space shuttle curator Valerie Neal made sure that Space Shuttle Discovery, [which now has arrived] at the museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, will be as authentic inside as possible. She asked that the real WCS be re-installed.
More: Fabulous space photos from NASA’s Hubble telescope
Indeed the space toilet is by all accounts at the heart of what many tourists want to know about space flight after they ask how astronauts eat. And NASA a couple years ago did a video on the training needed to operate the space potty.
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