Artemis Boldly Goes Where No Toilet Has Gone Before

It was about 65 minutes after liftoff, the Integrity spacecraft 800 miles above the Indian Ocean and moving at about 16,000 miles per hour, when the historic words were spoken: "Integrity , Houston, toilet is powered."

It was a spaceflight milestone. Artemis II, which launched from Florida Wednesday evening, will put four humans around the Moon for the first time since the Apollo missions ceased in 1972. But the Orion crew vehicle, named Integrity , has something those Apollo astronauts lacked: an onboard toilet. As Orion spends its first day boosting itself to a high-Earth orbit in preparation for its lunar jaunt, it's already farther from the planet than any crewed spacecraft in 54 years. That means its toilet is the most distant toilet in the history of humankind.