Human waste has bedeviled NASA engineers from the get-go. Alan Shepherd's first 15-minute suborbital flight was so short that no one thought to install a urine receptacle in his space suit. At T-minus 15 minutes, an electrical problem caused an 86-minute delay on the launchpad. Shepherd's bladder soon reached the bursting point, and he radioed the first-ever "Houston, we have a problem" message. After some deliberation, mission control had an answer: "Do it in the suit."

source: Wired 13.08, The Big Gulp, Tom McNichol, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/urine.html tags: Problems