Houston, June 3 (Reuters): After more than a year of training, a rocket ride to space and a two-day journey to reach the International Space Station, the shuttle Discovery crew floated into the orbital outpost with these words:

“Someone call a plumber?”

Someone had. With the $100 billion space station’s sole toilet on the blink, Nasa made room aboard shuttle Discovery for a new pump, which they hope will fix the problem.

“Yeah, we got it,” commander Mark Kelly assured station flight engineer Garrett Reisman as the two greeted each other in orbit yesterday.

The scene was replayed on Nasa TV early today.

The space station toilet, housed in the Russian-built Zvezda module, is disposing of solid waste but the urine collection system is not working properly.

Every three flushes or so it must be manually flushed with water, which takes two crew members about 10 minutes.