Eat Your Vegetables!

Abstract

It’s time to say more about that “Big Question” mentioned in the introduction. Lavatory facilities were absent in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules. The first lavatory in an American spacecraft did not appear until the Skylab space station was launched in 1973, twenty-two years after Alan B. Shepherd rode the first Mercury capsule into space. Shepherd would have appreciated the lavatory. No provisions for going to the bathroom were made for his flight. The idea was to stuff him into the capsule, light the engines, and pluck him out of the ocean, all in less than an hour. It didn’t work out that way. Technical problems stretched Shepherd’s time on the launch pad to hours, and the coffee he had before suiting up didn’t seem like such a good idea to him after all. Ultimately, Shepherd, the first American astronaut to fly into space, did so in wet pants.