Sophistication versus reliability
On space toilets, trips to Cancun, and the little things that break and make big things impossible
A long-distance flight to Cancun reported a loss of water supply to the lavatories and requested a diversion with more than two hours left in the flight. The pilots had the very reasonable concern that nothing would be sanitary without working sinks. And they’re right: Safe running water is a basic necessity, especially at 30,000 feet, even if the folks on the ground don’t seem troubled by the absence.
■ Modern air travel is full of paradoxes like this one: The technical sophistication involved in putting the airplane in the sky and keeping it there is enormous. The precision involved in components like the engines is mind-blowing. But the failure of just one boring system to deliver water can turn the entire aircraft into something as backwards as an unimproved campsite on the side of a mountain.
■ It was a problem experienced by the Artemis II crew, as well: Their incredibly expensive space toilet stopped working until troubleshooting could be done. And since we haven’t yet found a way to escape our own biology, that was a pretty big problem for the astronauts.
■ We are surrounded by illusions of technical perfection all the time, perhaps best illustrated by the fact that “turn it off and back on again” remains one of the main ways we fix our computers when they go awry. Sophistication and advanced functions are easy to recognize, but truly bulletproof reliability remains hard to find.