The International Space Station is screwed.

God, this would suck...

Four words you don’t want to hear in space:

“The toilet is broken.”

The crew aboard the International Space Station is working on a problem with the system for collecting solid and liquid waste, which is a trickier proposition without gravity than it is on the Earth. Space toilets use jets of fan-propelled air to guide waste into the proper container.

A NASA status report noted that last week, while using the toilet system in the Russian-built service module, “the crew heard a loud noise and the fan stopped working.” The solid waste collector is functioning properly, but the system for collecting liquid waste was not.

The crew tried replacing one device, an air/water separator, and then a filter, but nothing seemed to bring the toilet back to full operation. Russian mission control told the crew — Russian Cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, and Garrett Reisman, a NASA astronaut, to use the toilet on the Soyuz capsule that is attached to the station as a lifeboat. But that system has very limited capacity, and so repairing the system has become an increasingly urgent issue.

As so often happens when there’s a plumbing problem, house guests are on the way: the space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch on Saturday, with seven astronauts aboard. The shuttle, however, has its own toilet.

How would you like to be the astronaut that broke the bad news.

"So uh, yeah, we're having problems with the toilet. Chuck had a couple of space tacos last night and clogged the hell out of the thing. Since NASA didn't equip us with a plunger we have to wait a week before the Space Shuttle can get one up here."

"What do we do know?"

"You see that Ziploc bag you just pulled that sandwich out of?"

"Yeah."

"Save it."

I can see Ron Howard making a movie out of this staring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon.

Apollo 08, the Search for a Crapper.