More than halfway to the moon, the Artemis II astronauts grappled with a toilet problem | CNN

The four astronauts on the Artemis II mission currently hurtling through space have had a largely quiet journey so far. Very few in-flight issues have cropped up that could disrupt their peace of mind. The Artemis II crew’s 16.5-foot-wide (5-meter-wide) Orion capsule experienced a waste management-related problem that arose in the early hours of Saturday as Day 3 was winding down. “It’s an issue with dumping the waste out of the toilet,” Artemis II Flight Director Judd Frieling told reporters Saturday morning. “And so it appears to me that we probably have some frozen urine in the vent line.” The astronauts — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — were still fast asleep by midmorning nearly 200,000 miles (nearly 320,000 kilometers) from Earth as mission controllers continued to troubleshoot the issue. And by Saturday afternoon, early in Day 4 of the flight, mission controllers had a plan of attack: to warm up the frozen line by rotating the capsule to put the frozen urine into the sun. That appeared to partially unclog the pipe, allowing the capsule to expel some of the urine from the wastebaske