NASA Wants to Convert Waste Into Space Gold
upstart writes:
NASA wants to convert waste into space gold:
The thing about a spacecraft is there really isn't much room for stuff. As someone who lives on a sailboat with my family, I can certainly relate.
As human space ambitions grow beyond the moon, that creates real challenges for potential manned missions. So NASA, like all good sailors and efficiency-minded denizens of small quarters, is getting crafty. Instead of packing more stuff, what if there were useful ways to reuse the waste generated from old stuff?
That's the premise behind a new crowdsourcing challenge called Waste to Base Materials Challenge: Sustainable Reprocessing in Space, which seeks to find novel ways to deal with waste for future human missions to space sustainably. HeroX is a leading platform and open marketplace for crowdsourced solutions that's worked on previous NASA challenges in administering the competition and seeking innovative approaches to repurpose, recycle, and reprocess the waste generated onboard to enable mission sustainability.
[...] What waste, you ask? Trash, to be sure, but in the cold reaches of space, waste also includes human byproducts, such as faecal matter and carbon dioxide. Among the needs that space waste might help with, propellant or feedstock for 3D printing is two possibilities. The prize is open to anyone aged 18 or older participating as an individual or as a team, and there's some cash on the line, with a purse totaling $24,000.
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