Whizzing 250 miles above Earth at 17,500 miles per hour is already a unique office environment, but the astronauts aboard the International Space Station recently found themselves dealing with a universal workplace nuisance that is more commonly encountered in terrestrial office bathrooms.
The culprit in question? A leaky toilet in the Russian segment of the station, which despite its zero-gravity location, decided to behave in a most earthly fashion by springing an unhelpful leak. It may seem trivial in the grand scheme of international space collaboration and high-tech orbital science, but when your restroom starts malfunctioning in space, things tend to float into a new category of complication.
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, understated the situation with the sort of calm exasperation usually reserved for government IT departments, noting that the leak “did not threaten crew safety” which is bureaucracy-speak for “it was unpleasant but no one drowned.”
The incident occurred in the Zvezda module, which is not only home to the bathroom but also key life support systems, making it one of the less ideal corners of the station to develop a taste for unwanted moisture. NASA, meanwhile, confirmed that the American side of the station, which uses a separate toilet, remains in fully flushed working order.
“Space is hard,” as the saying goes, and it appears so is basic plumbing at zero gravity.
Engineers and astronauts dutifully mopped up the floating inconvenience with absorbent pads and the sort of grim determination usually displayed by people trying to fix a sink with a butter knife. The offending toilet has since been repaired, ensuring at least a temporary triumph of civilization over chaos.
No word yet on whether the maintenance log included any written sighs.