Spacemen call up Earth and ask for a plumber

It is the question astronauts are asked the most: just how do you go to the toilet in space? For the three crew on the international space station, this is no longer a humorous, lavatorial question; they have had to call mission control and ask for a plumber.

In the league of immortal one-liners it is not quite up there with Apollo 13 astronaut John Swigert Jr's "Houston, we have had a problem". But if you are on the space station, and the toilet's not working, you know the plumber is going to take a while to get there. So just like the Apollo 13 mission, it needs the same sort of ingenuity to work around it.



As one of the crew was using the toilet last week, its motor fan stopped. Since then, the liquid-waste gathering part of the toilet has been working on and off; fortunately, the solid-waste collecting part is functioning. Russian officials do not know the cause of the problem. The astronauts have jury-rigged a back-up bag connected to the toilet. A Nasa spokesman said: "Like any home anywhere the importance of having a working bathroom is obvious."

The agency hopes to send spare toilet parts out with the shuttle Discovery, due to blast off on Saturday. Nasa said technicians are considering having parts flown in and loaded in the shuttle during countdown, an unusual situation; the payload weight is limited and balance carefully calculated, making it difficult to work out where the parts can go. The seven-year-old, Russian-made toilet has broken once before, but not for such a long period of time.