A student-led Massachusetts Institute of Technology team has won the top prize in NASA’s LunaRecycle Challenge with a system designed to turn mixed space-mission trash into material for new parts.
How the winning system works
The project is called CERBERUZ, short for Composites for Extraterrestrial Recycling By Engineering the Reuse and Upcycling of Zotek. NASA says the system grinds mixed waste into a fine powder instead of requiring every fabric, plastic, foam or metal component to be perfectly separated first.
The powder can then become feedstock for injection-molded parts or 3D-printing filament. The team treated Zotek foam as a reinforcing material rather than contamination, an approach intended to make processing more practical when astronauts have limited space, energy and time.
A $775,000 result
The MIT team won both the prototype-development track and the digital-twin track, receiving $775,000 in awards. A digital twin is a virtual model used to simulate and evaluate how a physical recycling system performs.
Fourteen finalist teams demonstrated their prototypes at the University of Alabama from August 24 through August 28. NASA also recognized projects for innovation, mass efficiency, the number of waste types processed and public voting.
Why recycling matters beyond the novelty
On Earth, throwing something away usually means moving it somewhere else. On a lunar base or deep-space mission, every kilogram launched is expensive, storage is limited and replacement supplies may take months to arrive. Waste can therefore become a resource if crews can process it safely and reliably.
The winning prototype is not automatically a flight-ready machine. It would still need testing for reliability, power use, maintenance, contamination control and operation in lunar conditions. NASA designed the competition to identify promising ideas that can be developed further.
The technology could also have Earth applications where mixed materials are difficult to sort or transport. That possibility helps explain why the competition attracted more than 1,200 registrations during its first phase, a record for NASA’s Centennial Challenges program.
Source: NASA’s LunaRecycle results published August 28, 2026. Photo: NASA/Savannah Bullard, a United States government work.
Edin Pula
Edin Pula is the editor responsible for reviewing and publishing content at Smashology Media. He oversees sourcing, fact-checking, corrections, and editorial standards across coverage of internet culture, technology, entertainment, news, and crime.
