A funny story about how SpaceX dealt with clandestine toilet issues on the recent Micturation 4 flight. This kind of thing is SpaceX's kryptonite—if you look at what breaks on ISS, it's a slog of unglamorous maintenance issues with no cool engineering fix nytimes.com/2021/10/26/sci…
The Mars Toilet has to work without issues in free fall for six months to get to the planet, and then is required by international treaty to work at at least a Biosafety Level 4 containment level (!) while on the Martian surface, which Elon Musk really doesn't like to talk about.
Keeping their off-grid airless mobile home working is the full-time mission of the ISS crew when they're not exercising to slow bone loss. Making this primate zoo not require constant repair and resupply is the real impediment to Mars exploration, not "we need a bigger rocket". 
People think a Mars mission would be Apollo on steroids, but the reality would be ISS... in spaaace! If you love years-long research on osteoporosis and mold control then the next two decades of manned space flight working up to a Mars flyby are going to be a treat for you.
We pledge send people to Mars not because it is easy, but because it offers a forty year detour from properly exploring the Solar System with cheap robots who never have to pee.
Remember that the current SpaceX plan for Mars is to send an autonomous remote factory there in 2024 to produce 240 tons of propellant using the same technology that died on the ISS despite 6 years of constant repairs, having generated one ton of water. ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/hand…
The reason an entire discipline (chemical engineering) exists is because taking chemical reactions from milligrams to grams to kilos to tons of output is hard even before you try to do it with space dads in low earth orbit, let alone expect it to run unattended for years on Mars.
If you're not obsessed with space, you may not realize that we lack the technology to keep a crew alive for a month with closed-loop life support on the front lawn of the Kennedy Space Center, let alone in any kind of harsh environment.
The real story arc of Breaking Bad wasn't "high school chemistry teacher turns into the devil", but "self-funding research chemist designs and builds industrial scale pharmaceutical plant"
I will be honest that my favorite scenario is where an elderly Musk retires to the small colony of a dozen obsessives eking out a living on Mars, and then that gets hit by the planet-killer asteroid.
My question for the "Mars is plan B for humanity" crowd is, what's plan C? Unless you like blimps and acid rain, there's no other planet we can colonize to play dodgeball with planet-killing meteors. Why not just chart the solar system with robots and work the actual problem?
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