Apollo 13 astronauts once reported a floating turd drifting through their cabin and screamed for a napkin.
That was 1969.
Fifty-seven years later, NASA just launched a $4 billion moon mission and the toilet broke within hours of liftoff.
Artemis II Toilet Malfunction: What Actually Happened
The Artemis II crew – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen – launched April 1 aboard the Orion spacecraft named Integrity.
By the time they were orbiting Earth, the toilet fan had jammed.
Mission controllers scrambled to walk Koch through a manual fix.
The urine collection fan got working again – briefly.
Then on Day 3, the toilet stopped dumping waste overboard entirely.
"It's an issue with dumping the waste out of the toilet," Flight Director Judd Frieling told reporters Saturday morning. "It appears to me that we probably have some frozen urine in the vent line."
Engineers reoriented the capsule to bake the frozen vent line in direct sunlight.
Mission control told the crew the toilet was cleared for solid waste only.
The full fix took until early Day 4, with astronauts using backup urine bags in the meantime.
NASA Deputy Program Manager Debbie Korth assured the public that "space toilets and bathrooms are something everybody can really understand" and that it's "always a challenge."
Your tax dollars at work, folks.
Boeing and Lockheed Cashed the Check on a 93 Billion Dollar NASA Contract
Here is what this mission actually costs you.
NASA's Office of Inspector General calculated the operating cost of a single Artemis launch at $4.1 billion.
The total program – the rocket, the capsule, the ground systems – has already burned through over $93 billion since 2012.
Boeing built the rocket.
Lockheed Martin built the Orion capsule.
Both are the primary recipients of NASA's cost-plus contracts – meaning they get paid regardless of whether the program comes in on time, on budget, or with a working toilet.
Boeing has mismanaged virtually every major government contract it has touched, and NASA kept paying.
The program is eight years behind schedule.
The original Trump-era goal was a lunar landing by 2024.
Now they're talking 2028.
For that $93 billion, NASA produced the Universal Waste Management System – a space toilet that broke twice in the first 72 hours.
Nobody at Boeing got fired over it.
That is cost-plus contracting. You pay either way.
What China Is Doing While NASA Fumbles Its Moon Mission
Here is what nobody in the media will say out loud.
While four NASA astronauts – including one Canadian on American taxpayer dollars – were passing urine bags around a $4 billion capsule, China was watching every second of it.
China's space program doesn't use cost-plus contracts.
They don't hold press conferences to explain why the toilet froze.
They don't spend 15 years building a rocket that costs $4 billion per launch.
China is targeting the lunar south pole.
They want the water ice there – because water ice becomes rocket fuel, and whoever controls that controls the next century of space.
https://twitter.com/brane_mija64426/status/2040528904943739287?s=20
Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill locked in $10 billion for NASA's lunar program because he understands what's actually at stake.
But $10 billion doesn't fix a procurement system where Boeing and Lockheed operate with zero financial consequence for failure.
The mission itself – the astronauts flying it today – is genuinely historic.
Today they will travel farther from Earth than any human beings in history, surpassing the 248,655-mile record set by the crew of Apollo 13 in 1970.
Those four Americans will see parts of the lunar far side no human eye has ever witnessed.
They earned it.
Boeing and Lockheed didn't earn anything.
They just billed you for the broken toilet.
Sources:
- Simon Kent, "Toilet Troubles Plague Artemis II as It Speeds Toward the Moon," Breitbart News, April 5, 2026.
- NASA, "Artemis II Flight Day 4: Deep-Space Flying, Lunar Flyby Prep," NASA.gov, April 4, 2026.
- "Years of delays, billions over budget: How NASA's Artemis II became a make-or-break moon shot," NBC News, March 26, 2026.
- "Billions Over the Moon: Is Artemis II Worth the Price Tag," New Space Economy, April 1, 2026.
- NASA Inspector General, Artemis Program Cost Assessment, cited in New Space Economy, April 2026.