During the six successful Apollo lunar missions from 1969 to 1972, 12 NASA astronauts left 96 bags of human waste on the moon. Now NASA is offering $3 million to the person who invents a technology to recycle this waste as part of the NASA LunaRecycle Challenge.
Of course, it’s not that Apollo waste is somehow littering the Moon, it’s about future missions, where there will be more of this waste and it will need to be dealt with somehow. The LunaRecycle Challenge is a two-stage competition with a prize pool of $3 million, the goal of which is to design and develop recycling solutions that can reduce the amount of solid waste and increase the sustainability of long-duration missions to the Moon, i.e. the Artemis missions and their successors.
The main objectives of the competition:
- transforming waste (primarily organic waste) into valuable resources such as water, nutrients, energy, or fertilizers;
- minimizing environmental and biological hazards associated with waste in enclosed spaces;
- creating systems that are energy efficient, compact, and capable of functioning in the lunar environment;
- creating closed systems necessary for autonomous space habitation modules.
The solutions resulting from the competition should increase the efficiency of waste processing in space; reduce the release of harmful by-products; obtain compact solutions for waste management (processing, storage, transportation) at the community level. Such solutions may also be needed on Earth, in some remote communities and settlements where traditional waste processing is impossible, such as in Arctic and Antarctic conditions, in mountains, deserts, etc.