With manned Artemis launches on the horizon, NASA is looking for sustainable solutions for waste management during long-duration missions to the Moon.
An initiative called LunaRecycle, under the space agency’s Centennial Challenges program, aims to stimulate the design and development of recycling solutions for use on the lunar surface and/or in pressurized lunar habitats. The program aims to reduce solid waste streams during long-duration lunar missions under the Artemis program, as well as improve the sustainability of future space exploration.
“As NASA prepares for future human space missions, there will be a need to consider how various waste streams, including solid waste, can be minimized, as well as how waste can be stored, processed and recycled in the space environment, so little or no waste would need to be returned to Earth,” according to the LunaRecycle Challenge Phase 1 contract opportunity.
With so many missions to the moon, both private and government, some scientists argue that humanity has entered a new “lunar anthropocene,” marked by an era in which humans begin to change the moon forever. After all, previous crewed lunar missions have left landers, flags, science experiments, golf balls and even human excrement on the lunar surface.
NASA wants to reduce the impact of astronauts on the moon with this new program. Still, establishing a long-term presence on the lunar surface would require the transport of a lot of cargo from Earth to the Moon, leading to the need for reuse and recycling processes to minimize disturbances in the lunar environment. For context, everyday items such as paper, cardboard, plastics, metals, textiles and glass make up over 50 percent of U.S. municipal solid waste, and only 40 percent of that waste is recycled, according to the challenge statement.
NASA aims to address this recycling deficit head-on with this new LunaRecycle initiative. “This challenge will focus on approaches to recycling materials very similar to materials that are difficult to recycle,” the draft rules state.
“The challenge has the potential to highlight entirely new approaches to recycling; processes that improve energy and water efficiency; processes that reduce waste products and toxic emissions; and smaller-scale solutions that can be implemented in communities in a more widespread way than recycling facilities today.”
The LunaRecycle Challenge will have two competition tracks, including a “digital twin” track that requires participants to design a virtual model of a system that can recycle one or more solid waste streams of lunar surface and produces one or more final products. Additionally, the prototyping track focuses on the design and development of actual hardware capable of recycling one or more types of solid waste on the lunar surface.
This will help meet the need that NASA envisions for “a variety of end products that can fully or partially utilize materials created by the recycling process,” the draft rules state.
The competition will consist of two phases, with each team considering the technical details of their proposed solutions for review by a jury. Phase 2 depends on the presentation of viable approaches to address the challenge in Phase 1, according to the established rules.
Total funding for the LunaRecycle Challenge is $3 million, with $1 million allocated for Phase 1 and $2 million reserved for Phase 2. Registration for Phase 1 opens in September, with applications due by March 31, 2025. Judging will begin in May, after which winners will be announced, along with rules for Phase 2.
