Before suiting up, Chuck Jones decided to take a dump.

That involved stripping stark naked, and climbing into the storage bay under the three metal-frame couches. Apollo’s waste management system consisted of a collection of plastic bags, with adhesive coatings on the brim, and finger-shaped tubes built into the side. Jones had to dig into the bag with his finger — nothing would fall, after all — and hook his turds down into the bag. And afterward he had to break open a capsule of germicide, drop it into the bag, and knead it all together.

In a moment the sounds and smells of it were filling the cabin.

Dana just sat and endured it. The lousy design of the system was hardly Jones’s fault.

The irony was that the Apollo system had been heavily upgraded in the last few years. Rockwell had stretched the original lunar flight design, making it more robust and reliable, and increasing its capacity; Apollo was mostly used as an orbital ferry craft for taking crews to and from the Skylabs, but even flying solo it was capable of supporting as many as four men for eight days in orbit. Rockwell was even trying to make the Command Module reusable, by providing saltwater protection and modularizing its components — so a module could be cannibalized after splashdown, even if the whole thing couldn’t be flown again.

But some things they hadn’t gotten around to fixing, like the plumbing arrangements.

Dana was finding his first flight in space, with its long string of hassles and discomforts, a surprisingly depressing experience. The contrast between the Zenlike emptiness of cislunar space, and the scrambled human attempts to survive in it, struck him powerfully. And the immaturity of the technology compared to his aviation background was striking.

But we really are at the edge of our capabilities out here. Dad’s right. We’re not really up to this. Not yet. We just aren’t smart enough. Clever monkeys, improvising, making it up as we go along, riding our luck, hauling along our plumbing.

Still, it was one hell of an adventure to tell his son Jake about.

Dana took his turn on trash detail. He collected the food bags, spiked them with pills to dissolve the residue, rolled them up tightly, and stuffed them into a plastic garbage bag. He stashed the garbage in a storage compartment. The compartments had been almost full within a few hours of leaving Earth orbit, and the garbage was dumped regularly into space; Enterprise was heading for the Moon surrounded by a little orbiting cloud of food bags and other trash.

The crew settled down to its pre-LOI checklists. It was all done in an uncharacteristic silence, Dana observed. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. Arguably Lunar Orbit Insertion was the key moment of the mission; on it depended the success of their flight — and, of lesser importance to the career astronaut, the success of Moonlab itself.