Establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon demands advanced spacecraft, spacesuits, life‑support systems, and a strategy for handling waste. The MIT CERBERUZ team won first place in both the prototype and digital‑twin tracks of NASA’s LunaRecycle Centennial Challenge.
Their system first separates non‑biological waste into thermoplastics and everything else, grinds both streams into a fine powder, and blends them together. The powder feedstock is loaded into an injection‑molding machine; the thermoplastics melt while suspending the remaining particles, and the mixture is injected into molds to produce high‑quality composite parts quickly.
A key breakthrough is the recycling of Zotek F30 closed‑cell thermoset foam, which traditionally cannot be combined with thermoplastics. CERBERUZ crushes the foam and uses it as a reinforcing filler in the molten plastic, turning a lightweight, bulky material into a structural advantage and preventing large accumulations of foam.
The entire recycling loop relies only on mechanical processes powered by electricity, avoiding water‑intensive or chemical depolymerization methods and generating no secondary chemical waste—crucial for the Moon’s resource constraints.
Alongside the hardware, the team built DEIMOS (Digital Environment for Intelligent Modeling of Operational Systems), a digital twin of the injection‑molding machine. DEIMOS ingests production data to predict mold fill, warpage, and shrinkage for various material blends and part geometries, allowing astronauts to assess part performance before committing scarce resources.
CERBERUZ emerged from MIT’s Space Resources Workshop, bringing together undergraduates and graduate students from Aeronautics and Astronautics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and Materials Science & Engineering. Over two years the team progressed from concept to final demonstration, earning $925,000 in prize money, which they plan to reinvest in the workshop’s equipment and facilities.
The project demonstrates a viable pathway to convert lunar packaging waste into locally sourced manufacturing feedstock, laying a technical foundation for sustainable, long‑term lunar habitation.
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