If there was an emergency in space and you had to wear your space
suit for a week, where would all the **** and **** go? What if
you puked in your space suite?

1) They don't have a week's air supply

They don't have to when they're attached to the ship's air supply.

Unless of course the emergency happened to involve the ship's air
supply... but then we come-back to the question of duration of
consumables in a completely independent-of-the-ship spacesuit.

Apollo suits had umbilicals for this purpose. The only time they
used the portable life support system (i.e. the backpacks) was for
lunar EVA's. All other Apollo EVA's, including Skylab, used
umbilicals. Most (all?) Gemini EVA's didn't use backpacks either,
except for the Gemini EVA which was to include testing of a manned
maneuvering unit (which was cancelled due to overheating of the
astronaut during EVA).

So, why were umbillicals dropped for ISS EVA's? Doesn't that tether
get rather in the way?

3) They don't have much of a water supply for the astronaut
(shuttle EMU suits offer 21 and 32-ounce water bags), and no food
supply.

I'd imagine that the suits used in the CEV will need umbilical
attachments to handle just such a contingency. It would be easy
enough to provide a drinking water supply through the umbilical.
Since you've got air and cooling water connections anyway, what's
one more connection?

Straws and the backs of camels come to mind Or perhaps angels
dancing on the head of a pin

I would think that a space suit which relied on a tether would make it
somewhat difficult to go from one spaceship to another - say the
rescue ship if such a thing existed. One might dock I suppose, or go
the path of "Iron Man One" or somesuch, but a tether-less suit seems
to be more "flexible" - modulo the issue of consumables.

rick jones
--
The glass is neither half-empty nor half-full. The glass has a leak.
The real question is "Can it be patched?"
these opinions are mine, all mine; HP might not want them anyway...
feel free to post, OR email to rick.jones2 in hp.com but NOT BOTH...