Space Sauna

We visited Cité de l'Espace, a science museum dedicated to space exploration in Toulouse. It is a wonderful museum for the kids to explore, though I was not super impressed as most of the displays were replicas. But one thing that definitely caught my attention was the Mir space station (replica, of course), and in particular the shower and sauna tank they had.

Very interesting, but is this for real?

It looks like it is, the sauna sessions society for instance has a story about it, including a fight between the management and the astronauts whether to keep the sauna and shower even though it was consuming space and resources. 

Quora seems to confirm that the steam room was operational between 1986 and 2001 in this article. Russia Beyond also tells about the space sauna.

And the Mir Wikipedia article confirms it: 

Mir featured a shower, the Bania, located in Kvant-2. It was an improvement on the units installed in previous Salyut stations, but proved difficult to use due to the time required to set up, use, and stow. The shower, which featured a plastic curtain and fan to collect water via an airflow, was later converted into a steam room; it eventually had its plumbing removed and the space was reused.

Sad that some bureaucrats had it removed, the crews had fought to not get it removed for a long time, successfully, but eventually someone came in and removed it....

Mir outside:

Mir inside:

Sauna (see also the opening picture of this article):

Overview of the museum:

One real thing they have is a moon rock:

For aviation museums in Toulouse area though, the #1 is clearly Musée Aeroscopia. See my other article about that.

'For more flying stories, check out the planetflier.com website! For more sauna and swimming stories, check out planetswimmer.com and saunablogger.cool websites! And of course the Planetcaver, and Planetskier blogs for other stories in Blogspot and TGR! The photos and text (c) 2024 by Jari Arkko. All rights reserved.