NASA opens the wallet and offers USD $ 35,000 to anyone who can invent a functional toilet for humans to use on the Moon.
NASA has achieved achievements that were considered impossible a few years ago. We saw how they completed their first private manned mission as a team with the guys from SpaceX recently and it seems like that’s just the beginning.
There are very ambitious plans for the space agency, and it seems they are now aiming to finally overcome one of the most complicated challenges of space exploration: figuring out how to use a toilet on the Moon.
It sounds absurd, typical of a bad episode of The Simpsons (or a good one from Space Force), but in reality NASA has launched this innovation challenge through the Artemis program and the platform HeroX, under the title of NASA’s Lunar Loo Challenge.
There, he offers a reward of USD $35.000, divided into three parts, for those who manage to design a functional toilet so that astronauts can use it when they are on the Moon.
The problem with gravity
He biggest challenge for this space toilet it is that it does not only work under microgravity conditions, as in the International Space Station (ISS).
Rather, it also operates smoothly under the Moon’s gravitational conditions. Which is one sixth of the existing on Earth.
Among the design requirements it is requested that the toilet should occupy no more than 0.12 cubic meters of space and should not produce more than 60 decibels of noise.
The space toilet must also be able to collect urine and feces at the same time. As well as containing at least 1 liter of liquid waste and 500 grams of solid waste.
It must even support the storage of at least 114 grams of menstrual blood per day. So the challenge is serious and more complicated than it seems.
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