The toilet on the Orion spacecraft has broken down for the second time (3 photos)
In space, you're not the pinnacle of creation, but simply a biological object whose survival depends on the proper functioning of a single sewer pipe. 
At the very beginning of the flight, when the astronauts had just left Earth orbit and were heading for the Moon, the waste management system suddenly went into "non-compliance." NASA then cheerfully reported that "the crew, working with Houston, had restored functionality." In fact, they had tweaked something and blown it, but, as it later turned out, it was only a temporary truce. We wrote about this in more detail here.
But this was only the beginning of the real tests. Mission Director Judd Freeling officially confirmed: the only toilet on board had once again died a hero's death in an unequal battle with the laws of physics. 
When attempting to bleed the wastewater tank, the system responded with an "oops." Houston suspects that a simple ice plug had formed somewhere deep within Orion. Apparently, the cold of space proved stronger than NASA's technology, turning the waste from the four elite astronauts into an insurmountable ice jam. By Saturday afternoon, early in the fourth day of the flight, mission controllers had a plan: warm the frozen line by rotating the capsule to expose the frozen urine to the sun. This apparently partially cleared the line, allowing the capsule to release some urine from its trashcan-sized reservoir into the vacuum of space. 
On Artemis 2, a collapsible urinal unit (CCU) is being used after a toilet malfunction.
While engineers on Earth are scratching their heads over how to prevent the system from freezing again, the crew has been ordered to switch to "Plan B." And no, this isn't a high-tech nano-toilet, but good old-fashioned collapsible urination devices. Simply put, bags. The four heroes, selected from thousands of hopefuls for the historic flight around the Moon, clearly didn't plan their triumph this way. Incidentally, that's not the only problem: one of the astronauts' personal computers has given up the ghost.
Yet Artemis II was marketed as man's triumphant return to the Moon. In reality, what we have is a billion-dollar tin can, where the key survival skills are the ability to accurately shoot into the bag while the life support system struggles to digest the ice plug. It seems the path to the stars is still thorny, and the main danger in space is not aliens or radiation, but a frozen wastewater tank, turning a heroic mission into an endless sitcom episode in the spirit of The Big Bang Theory.
