NASA Astronaut Peggy Whitson — The NASA Village

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The NASA Village

Today in the NASA Village… The Space Toilet.

Jeff Stone is a flight controller and trainer. His advice to the NASA Village audience, “Always learn all you can so you can better handle whatever comes your way.”

Today’s learning was essential to living on the International Space Station. What could be more important than learning how to make sure the space toilet keeps working?!

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The process of learning is critical to the training of an astronaut because we are constantly absorbing new information. You have to enjoy the processes of learning itself.

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For me, the most essential form of learning in the NASA Village is learning by doing.

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But sometimes looking behind the panel at the spaghetti of components can be confusing, and it is not possible to understand the big picture, without diagrams and procedures, as well. This combination of teaching methods is one the most effective for me and Jeff did a phenomenal job of combining it all together.

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One of the critical components of the system involves a substance that is added to each “flush”, called conservant. This minimizes the bacterial growth in the stored urine before it is plumbed to the water processing assembly, and cleaned up for later drinking (yes, I said drinking). Here Jeff is reminding me of the critical steps in this somewhat tricky valve.

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Being “elbow deep” in repairs is not uncommon on station. This training turned out to be incredibly useful to me on the SECOND day after we arrived on station! There had been a failure of the separator (unit that separates air and urine) which meant some major repairs were needed. I was sure glad I had Jeff’s training that day!

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Learning new things is always exciting for me…even if it is not always easy. It is great to work in an environment where questions are welcome and instructors and flight controllers are excited about sharing their knowledge and experience.

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Jeff was always interested in aviation and space, but until he enlisted in the Air Force, he didn’t really think he had much chance to participate. As a nonmilitary astronaut, and before that a NASA biochemist, I can claim this is not true; because there are many military workers at NASA. For Jeff, “The Air Force provided the opportunity to gain confidence enough to really pursue challenging goals and then build on successes.” For me, that confidence was built in college and graduate school, where hands on testing (and failing) led to the ability to form better questions/experiments to lead to an end result. Repeating the process and finding alternative solutions became easier with practice.        

Fixing a spaceship takes a lot of people and a lot of innovative thinking. The reason Mission Control is so effective is because they know a lot about the mechanics of the hardware itself. If something goes wrong they need to have an idea of what is taking place. Jeff said, “You never know what is going to happen, and being able to deal with it using on hand resources, including your brain, is one of the keys to exploration.” He has been working on the space toilet for over fifteen years. He is proud of his work and his addition to the NASA Village because, who can’t relate?

Enjoying the process of learning builds better pathways to future learning. How do you learn best?

Do you want more stories? Find our NASA Villagers here!

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