I was right there with live-stream of the astronauts as much as I could be enjoying the glitchy feeds, relating hard with the cramped living quarters and... waste management issues.
When people go camping they don’t think much about where to put all the shit. It’s natural. It can go in the Nature. Or in the vacuum of space.
But what do you do when you have limited resources and are camping out in an urban environment that is all pavement, security cameras, limited privacy, and limited toilet usage?
And what ever nature that is available is precious and will be protected from being used as a toilet– I should add.
This was one of my logistics nightmares when I was one of the unhoused, living in a van in Williamsburg, Brooklyn back in the Hipster days.
Solid waste was by far easier to deal with. One can evacuate into a bag and drop that off in a trash can as one does with dog waste.
Liquid waste was more interesting to deal with. Especially in the cold months. I remember winding up with an accumulation of gallon jugs filled with frozen urine stored under the van. It was embarrassing.
I made myself do some reconnaissance and be brave (mostly that) so I could start doing waste disposal "runs" (walks actually) carrying sometimes four jugs of piss at a time to a nearby public toilet. (That's four gallons / 18.2 liters of urine, y'all.)
I would go from from where Figo Il Gelato Italiano is now (It used to be an unpaved parking lot for zip cars when I was there.), across N12th street, into McCarren Park and all the way to the toilets near Lorimer St.
It is about a four minute walk that my skinny ass made during daylight hours carting obvious liquid waste à la main to a proper sewer system access point. Then I would toss the empty containers in the waste bins and scuttle back to the van pretending to be a completely normal person.
I don’t think I ever used those toilets apart from those waste runs. They were not very pleasant.
And just like the astronauts, my actions were being scrutinized from afar. My upright and properly domesticated neighbors needed to watch to make sure I wasn’t going to start breaking into buildings and or stealing things, or be too... you know, improprietous. I was a street person. Or course they would need to be wary. It's what humans do.
I had to keep my head down while somehow hold my head high at the same time. And be sure to dispose of waste correctly lest I be visited by the fine fairy. Which sounds like it could be real nice. But it ain't. Because even if, damn they fine, they're going to ask me to cough up money that I didn't have yet that I need to buy food with.
Oh, to have billions of dollars backing me just to make it snow a little bit in space. No one wrinkles their nose at you in disgust for that.
Wildly enough, all of this fringe living nonsense was part of how I became included in the NASA Artemis space program. No, really.
Sticking it out in New York led me to becoming an art model. That put me in contact with a nerdy figurative artist friend who brought me in via the Lunar Codex. It’s a whole project where NASA litters the moon with examples of human creativity because… that’s is also what humans do…?
I can’t send children to the moon, but something of me is there in name and likeness. I got a Magario to the moon in some fashion.
And it did take me freezing in a tin can Apollo 13 style and being a mission specialist in charge of waste management to do it.
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