The quest to engineer a closed artificial environment to live in space illuminates the silent underside of human attitudes towards their environment and their waste. Hard-nosed NASA engineers spoke forthrightly about their focus on the dirt, muck, odor, and excrement during decades of experiments. With the International Space Station becoming a reality in the 1990s, this article describes NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston placed people inside their new life support modules complete water, air, and waste recycling. To live among the stars, ironically, always meant solving the down-to-earth problem of sustainable waste management.