NASA Holds Prize Contest for Moon Toilet Design, Check Here

Liputan6.com, DC – The United States Space Agency or NASA is reportedly holding a public contest with prizes for those who can design toilets for use on the Moon.

With prizes up to US $ 35,000, NASA requested that innovators be able to design the best toilets that would work not only in micrography but also on the surface of the Moon. the Guardian, Monday (6/28/2020).

“This is clearly not the main focus of the mission,” said Mike Interbartolo of NASA. “We will not return to the moon so we can say we defecated on the moon, but we also do not want a difficult situation like that.”

Interbartolo, is the project manager for the Lunar Loo Challenge, a NASA competition launched on Thursday 25 June 2020 that hopes to attract new and innovative solutions to the problem of capturing and storing human waste in space.

Participants will contribute to design toilet technology aimed at Artemis, NASA’s program to land the first woman and the next man on the moon in 2024.

Space toilet technology has come a long way from the gloomy times of Apollo, when bags had to be stuck to astronauts’ bottoms in settings that were not always as safe as expected. One mission transcript recorded an exchange between crew members: “Where did it come from? … There was dirt floating in the air.”

The international space station (ISS) has a large toilet made in Russia that looks like an industry that uses suction technology to overcome the challenges of defecating and urinating in microgravity. However, NASA is looking for something that will function equally well on the surface of the Moon, where gravity is only one sixth on Earth.

“We really don’t want people to just say we know what an ISS toilet is like, so we let go of a little mass and make it more concise,” Interbartolo said. “We are looking for unusual (designs) … We want to take advantage of thinkers, a community of space makers, and see what is not known out there.”

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