“The heater on the outside of the dump nozzle failed, so this blob of frozen urine froze on the side of the vehicle, and what they were worried about was on reentry this blob of ice would break off, fly back, hit the tail, gouge out the heat tile. The tail would be burned off, and the Shuttle would crash: I thought of my life being threatened in many ways, but never by a block of frozen urine.

Any rate, so we ended up using the robot arm. Hank used the robot arm to knock this piece of frozen urine off, but we were prohibited from using the urinal from that point, because they didn’t have any way of dumping it after that.

But there was still some of what they call ullage, which means there is room left in the tank for some urine. MCC called up and said that they estimated there were like, I don’t know, like three man-days of ullage left in the urinal.

It was clear what they were saying: Judy [Resnik] could continue to use the urinal. The men are going to use the plastic bags, which, let me tell you, is a mess to do.

But Judy could use—I mean, they didn’t say it, but it was obvious that, hey, we’ve got one woman aboard. There’s three days of ullage, three man-days of ullage left.

Let her use it.

But Judy didn’t, because she knew, she knew that if she did, and she got back to Earth, the press would eventually pick up on it. “Aw, they had to cut this woman some slack. Women are different than men. They had to cut her some slack and let her use the urinal. The rest of the men had had to pee in plastic bags.” [...]

Wright: Let’s talk more about this situation that occurred with the frozen icicle.

Mullane: The urincicle?

Wright: Yes. You were called onto possibly—

Mullane: Possibly do a spacewalk, yes. Hawley and I—which we were really hoping for. Hawley and I had trained as the backup—what do you call them? The contingency EVA [Extravehicular Activity] crew members, in case there was a problem.

There was no planned EVA, but they always have two crew members trained in case there is a problem that requires an EVA. So Hawley and I did a—I guess we prepared to do a spacewalk.

I later heard on the ground that the ground really felt that was a real long, long, long shot, that they would ever send out anybody to do a spacewalk to get rid of this thing. They felt like they would be able to do it fine with the robot arm, which they did.

But, of course, Hawley and I were praying that they would call us and say, “Go out on a spacewalk and knock this thing off.” But I was really looking forward to that, but it wasn’t to be, didn’t happen. Hank used the robot arm and reached in there and knocked the thing off.

Wright: Hank Hartsfield had training on the RMS [remote manipulator system]?

Mullane: He had used the RMS on his mission, STS-3. He’d used the RMS on his mission, I think, and so he was trained. Judy was trained on it, too. I don’t remember the logic process by which Hank used the arm and Judy didn’t. I don’t remember what the rationale was there, but I remember Hank used it to knock off that urine. So we’d better hope that any aliens that are in orbit go by the old Boy Scout adage, “Don’t eat yellow snow.” [Wright laughs.] Because there was going to be a blob of it floating around up there.

Wright: Our research has told us that during this situation that you guys became very resourceful of having to handle all of the lack of sanitary efforts up there. You ended up using some of your used clothing to help—

Mullane: Yes. Here, let me tell you about peeing in a plastic bag in weightlessness. I’ll get really graphic here.

When your bladder is full and you’re urinating, the urine separates from your body and moves away. And when you have the urinal, it’s being sucked down that urine hose and going into the waste tank.

Now, when you are using a plastic bag, the first thing we did was we tried to pee in a plastic bag, and that urine would hit the bottom of the bag and splash back out, and so you would have urine floating around, or you’d be trying to trap it.

We figured out then that if you took articles of clothing—and socks worked really great. We put socks in the bottom of those, but any other dirty clothes would work fine, too. And you urinate, the wicking action would still work fine in weightlessness. Things would wick in to the cotton or whatever it was, the clothing.

But you had to regulate your bladder, your flow rate of your urine to not exceed the wicking capacity, because if you did that, then it would start splashing again.

So you had to be careful, regulate your urine flow rate to make sure it didn’t exceed the wicking capacity of whatever it was that you had down there. And that worked pretty good.

The problem is, as your bladder pressure dropped off, a big ball of urine would stay with you, would stay on you. So then you had to use tissue to mop that off of you. That was a lot of fun, let me tell you.

[Laughs]