NASA announces Recycling in Space challenge winners

Figuring out how to repurpose food packaging, plastic, paper, fabric and other types of waste without gravity to work with is difficult. That’s why Washington-based NASA, in partnership with Cleveland-based NineSigma, created the Recycling in Space challenge.

The purpose of the challenge is to engage the public to develop methods of processing and feeding trash into a high-temperature reactor. This will help NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems and Space technology programs develop trash-to-gas technology that can recycle waste into useful gases.

The NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) crowdsourcing challenge received submissions from participants around the world. A panel of judges evaluated the solutions and selected one first place and two second place winners.

The award recipients are:

• Aurelian Zapciu, Romania – $10,000 for first place, Waste Pre-Processing Unit. This uses space-saving features, as well as ejectors that are cam-actuated, to move trash through a system. Then, another mechanism brings the waste products into a reactor.

• Derek McFall, United States – $2,500 for second place, Microgravity Waste Management System. This uses a hopper to deal with solid waste and controlled air streams for liquid and gaseous waste.

• Ayman Ragab Ahmed Hamdallah, Egypt – $2,500 for second place, Trash-Gun (T-Gun). This uses air jets to compress trash before moving it through the system, eliminating the need for gravity.

NASA says these recycling technologies could prove useful on planetary surfaces too. NASA, along with commercial and international partners, plans to go forward to the moon. Future lunar missions will build a sustainable presence in deep space and prove technologies for Mars and beyond. Addressing the environmental footprint during long-duration missions is one of the many obstacles NASA has to overcome.

“The challenge produced ideas that were innovative and that we had not yet considered,” says Paul Hintze, a chemist with NASA’s Kennedy Space Center exploration research and technology programs and a judge for the competition, in a news release. “I look forward to further investigating these ideas and hope they will contribute to our human spaceflight missions.”

The NASA experts evaluated submissions on several criteria. One of the most important was that the proposed mechanism operated without relying on gravity. The proposals had to take power, space, sound and crew safety concerns into account while meeting certain levels of performance. Submissions also could not rely on large amounts of consumables.

“I appreciated having a worldwide effort participate in this recycling challenge,” says Anne Meier, lead research engineer at Kennedy and one of the judges. “Much like Earth is our spaceship with similar needs of recycling, space is also going to have these challenges, and it is important to include collaborative solutions from all corners of humanity.”

Hintze says that being a judge was his most intimate experience with NASA crowdsourcing. These efforts, led by NTL since 2011, have helped the agency invigorate projects by uniting researchers, scientists and engineers with solutions to real-world challenges from outside the agency. The NTL also draws on the ingenuity of NASA personnel through NASA@WORK, which presents internal challenges to the NASA workforce.