In May 1961, Alan Shepard's Mercury flight was delayed so many hours on the pad that he eventually radioed mission control to say he had to urinate inside his suit, and engineers, having designed no plumbing for a 15-minute flight, told him to go ahead and short out the medical sensors taped to his chest

In May 1961, Alan Shepard's Mercury flight was delayed so many hours on the pad that he eventually radioed mission control to say he had to urinate inside his suit, and engineers, having designed no plumbing for a 15-minute flight, told him to go ahead and short out the medical sensors taped to his chest

On the morning of 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard had been strapped into a capsule the size of a phone booth when he finally keyed the microphone and told the launch team he needed to urinate. The Mercury-Redstone 3 flight — America’s first crewed spaceflight — was designed to last only 15 minutes from liftoff to splashdown. Nobody had built a way to relieve a pilot inside the pressure suit, because nobody had expected the pilot to be inside it for hou…