U.S. and Russia Can't Even Agree on How to Handle Astronaut Pee

It’s been a rough year for the people who keep the International Space Station (ISS) working. In June, Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket disintegrated less than three minutes after launching from Cape Canaveral, Fla., sending a cargo capsule plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean. The failure followed the October 2014 explosion of an Orbital Sciences rocket on a launchpad at the Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. In April, a Russian Progress cargo ship carrying three tons of supplies spun out of control in orbit and was destroyed as it fell back to Earth.

Both of the U.S. resupply vessels carried water-processing equipment needed on the station. Their failure to reach outer space raised the stakes for the Aug. 19 launch of an unmanned Japanese cargo craft, the Kounotori 5, or White Stork, which successfully docked on Monday. “Once it gets up to the space station, my life gets a whole lot better,” says Layne Carter, the water subsystem manager for the ISS at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center near Huntsville, Ala.