MIT Students Win $775,000 From NASA for Turning Moon-Base Trash Into Tools
The CERBERUZ team took first place in both tracks of NASA's LunaRecycle Challenge with a system that grinds mixed waste, including a foam that has no recycling solution even on Earth, into molded composite parts.
A team of MIT students has won first prize in NASA's LunaRecycle Challenge, a $3 million competition to find ways to recycle the waste a crew would generate on the moon, NASA and MIT announced. The team, called CERBERUZ, received $775,000 in total awards after placing first in both the prototype track and the digital twin track, according to NASA.
CERBERUZ stands for Composites for Extraterrestrial Recycling By Engineering the Reuse and Upcycling of Zotek. The team includes MIT undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students, NASA said. Its lead advisor is George Lordos, a research scientist in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and System Design and Management program, according to MIT News.
The problem is weight. Every kilogram sent to the moon costs an estimated $100,000 to $1 million, according to MIT's Space Resources Workshop, and a crew of four on the International Space Station generates about 2.5 metric tons of logistics waste a year, including food packaging, foam and gloves. "Waste packaging materials will inevitably accumulate when a lunar outpost is built, and at the same time, outpost construction and maintenance will require a steady supply of new materials, including replacement parts," Lordos told MIT News.
The MIT system splits non-biological waste into two streams, thermoplastics and everything else, according to MIT News. All of it is ground into a fine powder and mixed. In an injection molding machine, the plastics melt and the other materials stay suspended in them, so the mixture comes out as a composite part. The same machine can be adapted to extrude filament for 3D printers, the workshop said, and the team has produced items such as screwdrivers and food-system parts.
The breakthrough is what the team did with Zotek F30, a closed-cell foam used to protect aerospace hardware in transit. Mixed thermoplastics and thermoset foams like Zotek have no established recycling method, "even on Earth," MIT News reported. Instead of sorting the foam out as contamination, CERBERUZ uses it as a reinforcing filler, NASA said. The foam is so light that enormous volumes are needed to make useful mass. "We had big shipments of Zotek coming in, and one person can carry them on their head like it's nothing," said José Soto, a graduate student and the team's pre-processing lead. "The box is the size of a person."
The team named its machines for the classical underworld, according to the workshop's description: ORPHEUS cleans, HERCULES crushes, CHARON grinds, ASPHODEL separates, HERMES prints the molds, PERSEPHONE molds and extrudes, and HADES casts.
Fourteen finalist teams demonstrated prototypes at the University of Alabama's College of Engineering in Tuscaloosa from Aug. 24 to 28, NASA said. Other awards went to Penn State's RECLAIM team for most innovative, Cislune of Rosemead, Calif., for highest mass efficiency, and Team Lovegrove from Bob Jones University for most trash types recycled, each worth $50,000. Phase 1 of the competition drew more than 1,200 registrations, the most in the 20-year history of NASA's Centennial Challenges; CERBERUZ was one of 17 Phase 1 winners.
"It's incredible to see these technologies go from concept to prototype and digital twin demonstrations in that time," said Jennifer Edmunson, program manager for Centennial Challenges at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
What comes next is less certain. Prize challenges do not include contracts to fly hardware, and neither NASA nor MIT has said whether the CERBERUZ system will be developed further for an Artemis mission.
