Space: The Final Pooping Frontier

by Annabeth Bondor-Stone, Connor White, Lars Kenseth (Illustrator)

Overview

Discover the down and dirty scientific history of astronauts pooping in space in this funny and factual picture book.

Everybody poops. So, what’s an astronaut to do when hurtling through space with zero gravity and zero privacy? Go boldly.

This is a scientific history of pooping in space. From the earliest NASA missions up through the innovative results of their recent Space Poop Challenge design competition, we’ll see the evolution of pooping on the final frontier. With fascinating facts and a few mishaps and discarded technologies along the way, we’ll learn why it’s so hard to deal with waste management in space.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250222886
Publisher:	Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
Publication date:	07/02/2024
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	8.85(w) x 11.25(h) x 0.35(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Annabeth Bondor-Stone and Connor White make their picture book debut with Space: The Final Pooping Frontier. Their other books include the Shivers the Pirate series and Jaclyn Hyde. As television writers, they have worked on projects for Nickelodeon, Netflix, Disney, Sesame Workshop, and Apple. They live in Los Angeles.

Lars Kenseth is a cartoonist based in Santa Monica, California, whose work has appeared in Barron’s, MAD, Esquire, and the New Yorker. A television writer by day, his credits include Chuck Deuce (Adult Swim) and Norm Macdonald Has a Show (Netflix). He’s a 2016 Sundance Institute Fellow and a long-suffering acolyte of the New York Jets.

larskenseth.com

Editorial Reviews

2024-04-05
The straight poop on alimentary advances in space technology.

The authors “go boldly” into a frank account of how NASA strained to develop facilities for disposing of body wastes after astronaut Alan Shepard was forced to relieve himself inside his flight suit due to a four-hour delay in the 1961 launch of the Mercury capsule Freedom 7. In Kenseth’s cartoon illustrations, a diverse gaggle of NASA engineers go from puzzling over a porcelain toilet—which, due to clearly explained issues of weight and gravity (or lack thereof), would have been totally unsuitable—to concocting experimental alternatives to finally whooping at a job well done. Before that, though, early astronauts had to struggle with little bags (sometimes futilely, as a quoted snippet of transcript from Apollo 10 reveals: “Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air”). Though the International Space Station boasted two bathrooms when it launched in 1998, it wasn’t until 2016 that a feasible design for individual space suits was conceived of—the result of NASA’s international Space Poop Challenge. Technology related to liquid waste gets a pass until a note in the afterword, which discusses how it’s recycled on the ISS; still, prospective space explorers will doubtless be relieved by the closing assurance: “Now, wherever astronauts go—they can go!”

A well-digested info-dump. (sources) (Nonfiction. 6-8)

Kirkus Reviews