In space nobody can see your poo. Not since NASA installed a thirty-million-dollar toilet in its space shuttles.

And we’re lucky they did.

If they dumped solid human waste into the void outside the ship, the excrement would become frozen missiles travelling seven times faster than a bullet. Imagine that hitting your windscreen while you were sitting patiently on the freeway waiting for the traffic to move.

The new shuttle toilet uses pressurised air to pull solid waste from the astronaut’s rectum. OUCH! It is then dropped into a plastic bag - kind of like a doggy doo-doo bag – then dried and compressed. The sealed bag then drops into a holding tank.

The shuttles’ previous commodes used tanks which became full in sixteen-days. After that, the mission had to be aborted due to the overflowing waste – and a smelly cockpit. Long term missions were out of the question, unless of course, the astronauts never ate fibre, and were able to remain constipated for extended periods.

The new astronaut doo-doo bag solves all these problems. It would take years to fill the shuttle with plastic bags full of poo, and anyway, the food would have run out long before this – solving the need to use the bag at all.

Urine is handled differently by the new toilet. The astronaut puts a personal funnel over his or her genitals. The funnel forms a seal and uses a fan to create a vacuum, drawing the liquid into a holding tank.

From the tank, the urine slowly trickles through a pin-sized nozzle into space, where it freezes and turns into harmless gas.

Bet you always wanted to know this – didn’t you?