A fantastic Kirkus review for Annabeth Bondor-Stone and Connor White’s SPACE: THE FINAL POOPING FRONTIER

The straight poop on alimentary advances in space technology.

The authors “go boldly” into a frank account of how NASA strained to develop facilities for disposing of body wastes after astronaut Alan Shepard was forced to relieve himself inside his flight suit due to a four-hour delay in the 1961 launch of the Mercury capsule Freedom 7. In Kenseth’s cartoon illustrations, a diverse gaggle of NASA engineers go from puzzling over a porcelain toilet—which, due to clearly explained issues of weight and gravity (or lack thereof) would have been totally unsuitable—to concocting experimental alternatives to finally whooping at a job well done. Before that, though, early astronauts had to struggle with little bags (sometimes futilely, as a quoted snippet of transcript from Apollo 10 reveals: “Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air”). Though the International Space Station boasted two bathrooms when it launched in 1998, it wasn’t until 2016 that a feasible design for individual space suits was conceived of—the result of NASA’s international Space Poop Challenge. Technology related to liquid waste gets a pass until a note in the afterword, which discusses how it’s recycled on the ISS; still, prospective space explorers will doubtless be relieved by the closing assurance: “Now, wherever astronauts go—they can go!”

A well digested info-dump.