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NASA Finally Made a Toilet for Women

The new lavatory is a symbol of the agency’s growing recognition of female astronauts’ needs.
Source: NASA / Shutterstock / The Atlantic

Buzz Aldrin remembers feeling “buoyant” and “full of goose pimples” when he stepped onto the moon in 1969, becoming the second person to touch the surface of another world. The view was magnificent.

The first thing he did was examine the ground beneath his boots. “I immediately looked down at my feet and became intrigued with the peculiar properties of the lunar dust,” the Apollo astronaut recalled in one of his memoirs. “If one kicks sand on a beach, it scatters in numerous directions with some grains traveling farther than others. On the moon the dust travels exactly and precisely as it goes in various directions, and every grain of it lands very nearly the same distance away.”

The second thing he did was pee.

Aldrin, the first person to urinate on the moon (into worn around his waist) is one of hundreds of astronauts who, in between doing extraordinary things,

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