NASA awards MIT team top prize in LunaRecycle Phase 2

At a demonstration in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, MIT students put mixed mission waste through a grinder instead of sorting every material apart. NASA named their CERBERUZ team the first-prize winner of Phase 2 of the LunaRecycle Challenge, awarding it $775,000 after the prototype transformed trash into a usable powder.

The process is built around a simple reversal. Zotek foam, which a conventional recycling system might treat as contamination, becomes reinforcement in the mixture. That powder can then serve as feedstock for injection-molded finished parts or for 3D-printing filament. NASA says the MIT team won both the prototype track and the digital twin track, where teams build virtual models of recycling systems.

The setting matters. LunaRecycle is a $3 million, two-phase competition designed to reduce waste during missions to the Moon or deep space, while encouraging ideas that could also have applications on Earth. Fourteen finalist teams demonstrated prototypes at The University of Alabama’s Lee J. Styslinger Jr. College of Engineering from Aug. 24 to Aug. 28.

So, concretely, the result demonstrates a route from mixed fabrics, plastics, foam, and metals to new parts or printing material, rather than treating that waste only as something to store. It is not yet an operating lunar recycling plant: NASA describes CERBERUZ as a prototype and digital twin demonstration, with no deployment date given in the release.

The prize also shows how NASA is using student teams, universities, entrepreneurs, and space-technology enthusiasts to push a problem toward hardware. The Phase 2 awards followed more than 1,200 registrations for Phase 1, which concluded in 2025, and NASA says the challenge has produced concepts spanning recycling, digital modeling, and other approaches to extraterrestrial waste.