At Saturday’s news briefing, John Honeycutt, a NASA engineer who chairs the Mission Management Team, was asked about the public’s interest in Orion’s toilet.

He acknowledged the curiosity. “I think the preoccupation with the toilet is somewhat human,” he said. Honeycutt noted it isn’t a mission risk, but warned that if the crew were essentially camping aboard the spacecraft, the current arrangement makes things a bit harder. “I know we’re in a good state, but I would really like it to be in the best state it can be,” he said.

It’s important to remember that space toilets are hard to design. On Earth, abundant water and gravity make using the bathroom straightforward. In microgravity it becomes far more difficult. Apollo astronauts used bags. The space shuttle’s toilet occasionally failed. The International Space Station has four toilets and, with more space and ample recycled water, the issue is less severe.

Space toilets must work reliably

This is not a small issue.

You can get away with “roughing it” for bathroom needs on trips to the Moon, but a voyage to Mars — months in transit — is a different situation. If a toilet fails en route to Mars, there’s a real chance the crew could face life-threatening consequences. That’s why testing these systems on Orion now is valuable: the test flight exists to confirm life-support systems function for the crew, to find problems, and to allow fixes before future missions.

Overall, the Artemis II mission continues to proceed very well. Debbie Korth, deputy manager of NASA’s Orion program, said Saturday that the spacecraft is performing “remarkably well,” and that the vehicle’s overall behavior has “pleasantly surprised” the engineers on the program.

Things are going so smoothly, in fact, that attention has centered on frozen urine. Given the many serious things that could go wrong on a hazardous deep-space journey, a minor issue like this feels like a victory.

This notion isn’t new. Following this week’s successful Artemis II launch, NASA plans to operate the SLS rocket a few more times—possibly through Artemis V—as required by Congress. Friday’s budget proposal backs that approach. Isaacman has said he wants NASA to move away from the expendable SLS in favor of a commercial option, like SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn, for crewed flights once those systems are available—but that transition is still several years away.

“To execute missions beyond Artemis V, NASA will initiate a new procurement to obtain commercial transportation services to launch astronauts to rendezvous with the lunar landers,” the agency said in a budget summary published on Friday. NASA said this procurement is expected to begin in fiscal year 2027.

Portions of the vision Isaacman and other NASA officials outlined last week—such as deep-space nuclear propulsion, lunar nuclear reactors, and prospecting for resources on the Moon—will demand substantial investment in new space technologies. Under this budget, one new initiative would fund a commercial effort to produce, store, transfer, and test rocket propellant made from materials on the lunar surface.

But the overall outlook for NASA’s space-technology portfolio is bleak. The White House proposes cutting $297 million from NASA’s space technology directorate compared with this year—and $476 million less than 2025—targeting what the Trump administration describes as “frivolous technology projects with no applications.”

The White House budget office also seeks to cut $1.1 billion from International Space Station funding, keeping the retirement and de-orbit of the ISS scheduled for 2030. That stance conflicts with a congressional bill backed by key lawmakers, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), that would extend the ISS to 2032.

Last week NASA announced a new strategy to help commercial companies build crewed outposts to replace the ISS in low Earth orbit. Despite delays and concerns about whether a commercial station will be ready when NASA retires the ISS, the White House requested only a modest funding increase for that program in 2027.

The administration’s spending plan would continue the Trump-era effort to eliminate funding for NASA’s education programs.

Madden definitively identified 565 Native American dice from 45 sites and classified another 94 artifacts as “probable” dice. Items with a drilled or pierced hole were left out of his survey because they could just as well be beads or other ornaments rather than dice. He also excluded pieces whose two faces could only be told apart by shape, without distinct markings, for the same reasons. The oldest examples, from Folsom deposits in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, date to the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago.

According to Madden, dice and gaming in these cultures were not like modern gambling, where the house has an advantage; instead, they likely played a social role.

“These games are one-on-one; there’s no house,” said Madden. “They were fair contests, with everyone having equal opportunity and equal conditions, and they functioned as a means of exchange, particularly between groups that did not interact frequently and thus didn’t really know one another. It’s essentially a form of gifting over time that builds lasting reciprocal relationships. It’s not a commercial transaction where you and I swap something and then go our separate ways.”

The results also illuminate early Native American notions of probability. “When we see the origins of dice, we’re literally seeing the origins of probabilistic thinking,” said Madden. “That origin has typically been placed in the Old World during the Bronze Age, about 6,000 years ago. This study indicates that Native Americans were making dice, producing random outcomes and applying those streams of chance in games of luck 6,000 years earlier. So, to understand the history of probabilistic thought, we now need to investigate the Old World at the end of the last Ice Age.”

That said, “These findings don’t claim that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were doing formal probability theory,” Madden added. “But they were deliberately creating, observing, and relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that exploited probabilistic regularities, such as the law of large numbers. That matters for how we interpret the global history of probabilistic thinking.”

American Antiquity, 2026. DOI: 10.1017/aaq.2025.10158 (About DOIs).

Since the engine burn went so well, NASA passed on the chance to carry out a “corrective” burn on Friday.

At their daily press briefing, NASA officials reported almost no significant problems. Howard Hu, Orion’s program manager, said NASA was monitoring an issue with the helium system that pressurizes Orion’s service module propulsion system to supply fuel and oxidizer to the engine. He added that Orion no longer needs that helium regulator for the rest of the mission, and that a redundant system is operating as expected.

Additional minor issues

There have also been a few “false alarms” from onboard environmental sensors. Hu noted these do not pose any threat to the crew but reflect conservative thresholds set for those systems. He described it as a “learning” that will be refined for the Artemis III mission, which could launch next year.

Another view of Earth taken from Orion.

Credit:
NASA

The only other notable issue for the crew was cabin temperature, which astronauts said felt a bit cool overnight. One of the mission’s flight directors, Judd Frieling, said the crew began with temperatures in the mid-70s, but after several “shell heaters” were turned off it became about 10° F colder. Multiple factors affect cabin temperature, and flight controllers adjusted the cabin atmosphere to a more comfortable level.

Humidity was also slightly below ideal for the carbon-dioxide removal devices. Those “scrubbers” perform better with higher humidity, and the crew has settled on a comfortable humidity level between “desert dry” and “Houston humid,” Frieling said.

In short, the crew is comfortable as they travel farther from Earth than anyone else has in half a century.