One of the truly great joys of this job is getting to speak with people whose work I just really respect and love. The kinds of writers and artists who I look at and think,

I, God, I want to be just like you. Well, on today's episode, I am talking with one of those people, author Mary Roach.

She is one of the truly great and I think maybe the funniest science writers of all time.

Since we are still on Space Week, this is also a conversation about the very gritty, very

non-glamorous realities of going into space.

Today, on day four of the Atlas Obscura Advent calendar and day four of

Space Week get ready for a great conversation about how you dock your behind with

a space toilet. The one and only Mary Roach to all kinds of places.

Research facilities full of decomposing bodies, taste testing labs for pet food, places that most of us have never even imagined existed.

Places like the space potty at the NASA Training Facility in Houston.

It's a bathroom, a large bathroom, and it has, I think it's a working model of the shuttle

toilet, which is very complicated.

You know, so it's the size of a washing machine with a, you know, a panel of instructions on the wall next

with.

That's your bathroom reading material.

There's like 25 steps.

Besides the instructions, when you sit on it, you'll see a little TV screen, but it is not

there to keep you entertained. There's a video camera facing up and a closed circuit television monitor right next to you.

So you are seeing what's on the video camera pointing up towards your ass.

They called it the potty cam. This is a

training toilet for astronauts because it turns out pooping in space is complex.

Because you need to learn to dock with it,

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