Space: The Final Pooping Frontier

Everybody poops, including astronauts, but doing it in zero gravity with almost no privacy is a real engineering problem. This funny and factual picture book traces how NASA tackled it, starting in 1961, when a long launch delay left astronaut Alan Shepard no choice but to go in his suit, through the waste bags of the Apollo missions and the toilets aboard the International Space Station, to the 2016 Space Poop Challenge that invited inventors to design something better. Annabeth Bondor-Stone and Connor White explain the science with plenty of jokes, and Lars Kenseth's cartoon illustrations include a diagram of a space toilet. It was a 2025 Orbis Pictus honor book.