170: Weight of breakfast steaks eaten by astronauts, in grams

Every Nasa astronaut since Alan Shepard in 1961 has been given a hearty breakfast before blast-off. All the pre-flight Apollo meals were specially prepared for nutrition, calories and – crucially – were what doctors refer to as "low residue". In other words, low-fibre meals that wouldn’t have astronauts needing the toilet too soon after lift-off.

Early missions also limited coffee intake before launch, because of its diuretic properties. Shepard’s Mercury flight, for instance, was only 15 minutes so doctors figured that he could avoid urinating until splashdown. Unfortunately, they did not account for countdown delays.

“They put Alan Shepard on top of his rocket without a way to take a leak,” says reporter Jay Barbree, who was commentating on the mission for US TV channel NBC. “After two hours, he starts complaining and desperately asks for permission to wet his suit – finally they gave him permission.” The astronaut is relieved but the medical sensors go crazy.

Astronauts flying in the Apollo spacecraft used personal urine collection devices – like condoms – which were connected to a disposal system, which ejected the waste from a port on the side of the spacecraft.

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Solid waste involved using plastic bags and most astronauts tried to avoid going to the toilet for as long as possible. The first to crack during Apollo 7 was Walt Cunningham.

“It was hard to get everything working just right,” he tells me. “You can catch everything but after that you had the get some pills loose from inside the bag and you spend your time mixing the pills up with whatever you had there – it was not terribly fun.”

2,800: Daily calories consumption

The first American to eat a meal in space was John Glenn. During his five-hour flight, he tested out a tube – a bit like a toothpaste tube – of apple puree, proving that people could swallow and digest food in weightlessness.

For the two-man Gemini missions of the mid-1960s, astronauts were allocated 2,500 calories a day and consumed plastic packs of freeze-dried foods produced by the Whirlpool Corporation (the home appliance company). Freeze-drying involved cooking the foods, quickly freezing them and then slowly warming them in a vacuum chamber to remove the ice crystals formed by the freezing process.