Buzz Aldrin Did His Moon Walk in a Boot Full of Pee
Having a body in space is ridiculously complicated, and we don’t just mean existing on a three-dimensional plane, as if that weren’t hard enough. We’re talking about the stars-and-darkness kind of space. Even the most basic functions of breathing without an atmosphere and moving without gravity are the stuff of nightmares, let alone managing all of the disgusting byproducts constantly pouring forth from your fetid flesh vessel. It’s gotta go somewhere, and historically, the systems for handling it in space have worked… not very well.
By the time of the Apollo missions, the device of choice for directing astro-pee was basically a condom connected by a tube to a bag that would then be emptied into a tank. As you can imagine, it had all kinds of problems — from leaks to full-on failure. One of those failures occurred at what was possibly the worst time in history for it, all because Neil Armstrong was too good at his job.
See, the lunar module he was piloting on July 20, 1969 had legs designed to crumple on impact, but he landed too gently to trigger the compression mechanism. That meant the astronauts ended up way higher from the surface of the moon than they were supposed to be. Have you ever had to jump down from the cab of a jacked-up truck? It was kind of like that. And in the giant leap that was supposed to be a small step, Buzz Aldrin’s condom-tube-bag system broke. Of course, having just landed on the moon, he promptly pissed his pants.
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With nowhere else to go, Aldrin’s little accident was funneled into one of his boots. That means he did his historic moonwalk sloshing around in a boot full of his own pee. All those famous photos and videos you’ve seen in history class, that was a man suffering from the most disgusting trench foot.
It’s not like they had showers on the moon, either — he had access to a slightly damp washcloth at best, so he presumably spent the rest of the mission just dealing with pisstoes. At the end of the mission, all of the astronauts took off their boots and left them on the moon, which was probably a great relief to Aldrin.
If you’re ever looking at photos of all the things we’ve left on the moon, keep an eye out for them. One of them is the historic piss boot.
