IN DEPTH: Humans in space
- Canada's astronauts
- Eight astronauts and one space tourist
- Exploring ISS
- Robert Thirsk
- Shuttle landings
- Civilians in space
NASA has made a last-minute change to its cargo aboard the space shuttle Discovery on Thursday, swapping 16 kilograms of equipment for something far more pressing: a toilet pump.
A lone NASA employee carried the pump on a commercial flight from Russia to Florida, arriving on Wednesday night, NASA said.
The pump is needed to fix a broken toilet aboard the International Space Station. The toilet can still handle solid but not liquid waste.
The breakdown has forced the three-person crew to periodically manually flush the urinal component, a process that takes 10 minutes and two people.
"Insert that into your daily life, and you can see it would be quite inconvenient," Kirk Shireman, NASA's deputy space station program manager, said at a news conference.
To make room for the pump, about 16 kg of equipment, including several torque wrenches, were removed from the shuttle.
The shuttle, scheduled to liftoff Saturday, May 31, at about 5 p.m. ET, will be carrying the Japanese Pressurized Module (JPM), the tour-bus-sized main component of Japan's Kibo space laboratory.
With files from the Associated PressShare Tools
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