[smackeyacky]

Perhaps nurses would be a better pool of astronaut candidates than test pilots.

I remember seeing a Russian space toilet when they had it set up in the powerhouse museum in Sydney. It looked like a booth with a vaguely pubic area shaped vacuum attachment designed to be unisex. I stared at it for some time trying to work out how it worked. The Apollo system seems horrendous!

[riffraff]

IIRC from the book " packing for mars" the American man astronauts begged NASA to provide them with diapers at some point, which is what women astronauts got, because the earlier male-only system was a sort of sucking condom which was incredibly bad.

[darkwater]

This really tells you how "bad masculinity" pervaded everything. I'm speaking of the designers here, not the astronauts. Why not a diaper also for male astronauts from the beginning? Isn't manly enough? Does it show weakness, like a toddler or an old dying man?

[riffraff]

I think the designers just didn't think of it.

Women also started with a feminized version of the uncomfortable device and then switched to diapers, and then men followed.

It's possible there were no women on the design team but I don't think it's a case of bad masculinity.

[darkwater]

I don't think that having or not having women in the design team is the key here. IMO it's more about how men perceive how men should be.

[brikym]

I'd take it over chasing a floating turd around and cleaning up the mess all over the walls.

[raverbashing]

Honestly replacing gravity with negative air pressure might have been the ideal solution

But I know that air is also a limited resource on space so it can't be solely an "airline-like system"

(Also discarding it "outdoors" might be the best solution in the end)

[the_af]

Space debris would have an additional meaning.