NASA Awards MIT Team Top Prize for Recycling Trash Into Lunar Building Material

NASA has named a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) the first-prize winner of Phase 2 of the agency's LunaRecycle Challenge, a competition to develop ways of recycling common waste — fabrics, plastics, foam and metals — generated during missions to the Moon or deep space. The MIT team, called CERBERUZ, was made up of undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students and received a total of $775,000 in awards.

CERBERUZ's technology grinds mixed trash into a fine powder, treating materials such as Zotek foam as reinforcement rather than contamination that needs to be sorted out. The powder can then be used as feedstock for injection-molded parts or 3D-printing filament. The team won both of the competition's tracks: prototype development and digital twins, which are virtual models of the recycling systems.

'The LunaRecycle Challenge finale is the culmination of two years of innovation spurred by this competition,' said Jennifer Edmunson, program manager for Centennial Challenges at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. 14 finalist teams gathered at the University of Alabama's Lee J. Styslinger Jr. College of Engineering from Aug. 24 to Aug. 28 to demonstrate their prototypes.

Other prize winners included Terasynth of Orlando, Florida, which took second place overall in the prototype track with its Lunar Re-Forge System and also won the people's choice award, and Moon Made of Boulder, Colorado, which took second place overall in the digital twin track with Fiber Forge. LunaRecycle is a $3 million, two-phase competition run in partnership with the University of Alabama.

Phase 1 of the competition, which concluded in 2025, drew more than 1,200 registrations — more interest than any competition in the 20-year history of NASA's Centennial Challenges — from which a panel of 50 judges selected 17 winning teams representing five countries and nine U.S. states.