NASA offering $3 million for lunar recycling ideas

[boingboing]

Originally published at: NASA offering $3 million for lunar recycling ideas - Boing Boing

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[Otherbrother]

@boingboing

One interesting element of this challenge is that it has two different tracks. The Prototype Build track, unsurprisingly, requires a physical prototype.

But does it require the contestants to actually eat the potatoes to demonstrate the full reuse cycle, or just to fertilize and grow them?

[anon59592690]

You don’t recycle cheese.
You eat it.

[anon61221983]

[Brainspore]

Well, I’m not going to give NASA any more ideas after they refused to pay me for my “Space Poop Challenge” submission back in 2016.

NASA's Space Poop Challenge

My concept:

[abutilon]

The first & most obvious problem: No plastics allowed. They’re pretty much unrecyclable.

[MikeR]

The cost of sending supplies to the moon is astronomical, so anything that can be recycled must be recycled.

Thanks to Senate processes, building a rocket by recycling Space Shuttle engines and SRBs also proved to be astronomically expensive.

[BakaNeko]

I've never eaten a real apple

[Jorpho]

@abutilon

No plastics allowed. They’re pretty much unrecyclable.

I understood one of the biggest obstacles was the immense difficulty in sorting out innumerable different resins. Presumably if you made absolutely everything out of the same plastic that could be uniformly processed the same way, it would be much more feasible. But then the obvious problem is that the same plastic cannot be easily applied to all possible uses.

[Lurk_No_More]

Here’s a freebie, NASA- just don’t do the phony, performative bullshit we pull here in the US.

[Phil_FR]

@boingboing

The cost of sending supplies to the moon is astronomical