The four astronauts on the Artemis II mission around the moon got some relief overnight after troubleshooting a malfunctioning toilet on the Orion spacecraft.

It’s not as if there was a plumbing backup on the toilet that will make history as the first ever in deep space. Instead, the crew reported a blinking fault light.

“We had a controller issue with the toilet when they spun it up. So we’ve got to work through that. That’s going to take up maybe a few hours of troubleshoot,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya when asked Wednesday about any minor problems on the spacecraft.

It was that comment that caught people’s attention amid other details such as a short-lived communication issue, a water tank valve that had shut and an electrical current failure.

A NASA update early Thursday morning confirmed that the 10-day mission to fly around the moon will be one that will not require alternative waste operations.

“The Artemis II crew, working closely with mission control in Houston, were able to restore the Orion spacecraft’s toilet to normal operations,” NASA stated.

As Mission Control told astronaut Christina Koch early Thursday, “You are good to use toilet all night.”

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen called it a day at 3 a.m. Thursday, having launched from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-B atop the Space Launch System rocket on Wednesday at 6:35 p.m.

It’s the first flight of Orion with humans on board, setting up future Artemis missions including a moon landing attempt targeting 2028.

They didn’t head to the moon directly, but orbited the Earth first to ensure Orion was safe. They then traveled to a higher Earth orbit with the help of the upper stage, which was also involved in a test of Orion’s propulsion as it flew around the stage after separation.

The crew had a four-hour nap before waking up to fly Orion to an even higher altitude that will set them up for their planned moonshot burn, called the trans-lunar injection, on Thursday night.

The mission will send them on a lunar fly-by, with them coming within 6,000 miles of the moon this weekend and then making their way back to Earth.

A broken toilet would not have stopped them, though. Their spacesuits have built-in waste disposal apparatus, including an external hose that can be hooked up that would send their urine venting out into space, said Katherine Plaza, who works on the Orion crew survival systems.

“It’s called the off-nominal waste management system,” she said. “The essence of it is that you’re removing urine from the suit, and it’s going through the vehicle wall and actually getting sprayed out into the vacuum of space.”

The solid waste is a different story.

“The fecal matter, unfortunately, just stays inside of the suit contained, and there’s things to help with smells and other things, gasses that can come about from that,” she said.

It’s basically a liner that filters out smells.

“So there’s actually been testing to verify that that system, after long durations of having some fecal matter in there, does not cause such a revolting smell that it’s unlivable,” she said.

The system is far advanced from the days when astronauts just had to make do if nature called. Before the first-ever launch of an American into space in 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard was told he couldn’t leave the capsule during a delay and had to go right in his spacesuit.

“Shepard had some trepidation about electrocution when he reconnected his suit,” according to Smithsonian Magazine. “By the time liftoff occurred about an hour later, the astronaut felt dry.”

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