NASA is offering $3 million to those who can help solve this problem

90 thoughts on “NASA is offering $3 million to those who can help solve this problem”

1. This is cool, maybe someday there will be lunar mobsters fighting over lunar waste management contracts. They could make a sci-fi Sopranos tv show about it.

2. Until the refuse problems on Earth are solved, please leave space alone. There is no need to make a garbage pile on the moon when we have oceans full of garbage still floating on Earth. Stop putting everything into plastic and stop creating messes everywhere. That would be my suggestion. Using biodegradable packaging would solve a lot of the problem.

3. Solar ovens with good temperature controls to recycle various types of plastics.
   Solar powered 3D printer machines to reprocess the plastics for manufacturing various new tool parts.
   Magnets for extracting ferrous metals for recycling.

4. I am thinking recycling is not the way…I think “reusable ” is the only true way…we don’t have to manage waste,IF we don’t make waste..so…we need to completely rethink how we build,store and use products…by discarding “packaging” so freely as we do ,we are making a HUGE mistake…ALL packaging needs to be returned for reuse..ALL…I will leave my comment there..Good Luck

5. Send it on a course for the sun. All it should take is a nudge and it will eventually get there. That is really the only answer.

6. Incinerator for all trash

7. Fuel the incinerator with rocket fuel

8. You can use the excess heat for energy generation.

9. If this doesn’t work, ask Elon he can figure anything out

10. Maybe a tip for.someone thinking of a lunar garbage disposal? :
    There is a huge incinerator that the Earth revolves around. Someone could devise a plan to easily get rid of the waste using alarge disposable containers and small thrust rockets to guide it on its way! No contamination of ground, water or air!

11. Throw it in the flux capacitor….duh

12. Take it Back to earth on the return supply ship and jettison it into the atmosphere before re-entry – it will burn up

13. I truly believe all of our garbage should be shipped to the nearest Volcano. Problem solved

14. I have a digital design I made with Ai. Called called LORS lunar omni recycling system. How do I present it?

15. As stated by [email protected]
    With all of our technology today we should be able to create a garbage shuttle with heat seeking technology. Direct it to the nearest planet that has volcanic activities. No environmental hazards, everything is vaporized.

16. Okay, I’m just going to Brain Puke here, I would guess that in the short term for waste management on the moon, it would never, 1st be a good idea for anything flammable or explosive to be on or near Our Moon. 2ndly, Our Sun could be a great instrument in devouring waste that cannot be processed on Our Moon, due to toxic fumes, by product etc. Although the correct vector would need to be calculated so no “man made”, Solar flares would occur that were directed towards Earth/Terra firma. Lastly a recycling plant ran by autonomous “worker’s”, would be a great idea 💡 😀, although, a Human element would always need to be present, and Life Guarded, with principles similarly found in Science Fiction regarding the #1 rule for AI. Let it harm none. Not even itself. In conclusion a recycling plant on the moon could never have any build up of any Materia that could explode or Implode, which would be even more Catastrophic for Us. A plant like what NASA would need for sustainability with next to a non existent footprint would have to be capable of melting down plastic without by product leaking out at all, same with metals, paper, etc. And it would need to be done slowly…every consideration as though the moon would possibly be TerraFormed, should be exhaustively researched until only a -1 footprint could be Mocked Up. As well if the moon were artificial already, hypothetically speaking, like rail transports, and an existing reactor, many things could be done more studiously.

17. Better ways to please people by more instant food none microwaveable the fastest way it’s more instant food

18. Throw it to the sun ! Dawg i wish I had thought of that.

19. Pretty easy…. ban plastics. When did pollution and landfills really start to fill? When plastics were being used. Steel? Recyclable. Glass? Recyclable. Paper? Recyclable and and can be composted. Rubber and plastic, pretty much not recyclable unless ground down and used in pavement applications. And definitely not good for the environment. Ban plastics. Very simple answer to a large problem. Go back to using glass bottles, paper bags, and boxes for packaging. All recyclable ♻️ indefinitely.

20. Send it to the sun , cook it . Can be done in one large sum, easy launch minimal fuel needed .

21. Seriously, lmao this is an easy fix they just don’t want to spend the money.

22. I could be wrong but I don’t think biodegradable material works the same way in space…

23. Thank you Elizabeth who didn’t even read the 2nd paragraph where clearly says “the initiative not only addresses challenges on the Moon but also aims to revolutionize recycling practices here on Earth”. This entire article is literally NASA looking for innovative ideas and generous incentives addressing your very concerns. You apparently
    Decided you know everything and are putting your chips on biodegradable and I’m with you on that. Use biodegradable materials as much as possible that helps to extent on here on Earth. I’m not sure how well that would work on the Moon with out wind and water. I’m not a scientist but maybe our above us all knowing Elizabeth can enlighten me through her problem solving Karen powers. My suggestion involves the removal of the most toxic of things on Earth ( Elizabeth Karen ) and a modified rail gun. No spoilers sorry. I hope we have more than her innovative mind working on this or we might as well lay down and wait to biodegrade ourselves.

24. Fill a rocket and send it straight into the sun. Burn it.

25. Edible packaging

26. I can solve it but will require 20% up front and a10 contract .

27. How do I tell my idea

28. As I am reading these comments a handful do have the right idea but not practical. How can you throw garbage into the sun since it is not reachable. Build a satellite hollow enough to maintain thousands of pounds of waste. Fill it with junk and control it to be sent in the direct path of the sun.

29. Have to use material from biodegradable and natural resources because this kind of material destroyed by self and it doesn’t harmful for soil also its produce natural gas ( cng ) as a byproduct.

30. Gather all the trash with a space robot with a big space cargo net with a rocket booster or several and sail.it right into a black hole .

31. That is incredible how can I apply we are running a waste management project where we use waste to works of Arts we turning trash into treasures.

32. Well with car tires it’s Countless things you can use them for.Now with the Trash maybe you could make a heat source with it or make oxygen with it

33. Couldn’t you use afterburners in a way that superheated the trash disintegrating it? A chamber between the ignitors and the exhaust system to harmlessly disintegrate the trash. A secondary option is possibly to do like the bomb squad. Put a cover over the trash like they would do when “safely” forcing a bomb to go off under a protective cover, then incinerate the trash at superheated levels under said cover Instead of a bomb.

    As for biomatter waste, recycle. Filter water to be used for cooling systems. And the rest becomes dry trash also able to be incinerated.

    Just an idea I’ve rolled around for a while.

34. Why are we shipping wast from outer space back to earth when we can not sustain our own waste here on earth…Also if I’m not mistaken have we not thought about the idea of sending our waste into outer space. They are treating our planet like a dump sight is this not insane do u see what’s happening here

35. Interplanetary exploration’s future is being overtaken by private commercial interests funded greatly by us, the tax payers. The future is here: Solar powered Tesla Waste Management outerspace sanitation vehicles (WMOSSV’s).

36. Send it to a black hole

37. The Boy Scouts have had a solution for many decades. “Pack it in, pack it out.” Use the containers the stuff was packaged in when it got there as refuse containers for hauling it out. And limit the amount of waste that gets generated.

38. Off the top of my head, we could use containers that are filled and then used as building blocks for buildings, retaining walls or whatever we wanted to use them for. and the containers would be well insolated using the trash for insulation.

39. Definitely , incinerator. Allow the metals to melt down and pour it into Ingots to reuse the metal.

40. I believe it should be Ai workers on moon to separate and recycled on moon monitored by humans here on earth once separated and recycled all reusable stuff should be transferred back to earth and used for whatever is needed in future space expeditions save costs on any reusable precious metals of course this would be a long range plan

41. Simple: mechanically shred all waste. Then place the debris into five-sided concrete blocks. After filling the five-sided blocks, cover the block with the final side of the concrete block.
    Finally, use the concrete blocks to construct roads, bridges, and structures.

    Simple!

42. Please make a barbie planet near earth out of recycled garbage and space junk I’m making a movie called Barbies the barbies and time travelors travel to outer space to save earth movie they build a barbieplanet out of oncoming asteroids made of pink diamonds and crystals and frozen ice water from space and comics and move the planet to shield earth from an oncoming labor from a black hole light years away and save earth

43. This is all so fascinating for a plan on a moon where we do t live. How about a plan for our own planet?? Hello??? Look at all the trash we produce daily.

44. Simple is that recycled with leaser technology to burn the materials and its will work in space easily . This idea is a gift for Nasa … Thank-you

45. Simple is that recycled with leaser technology to burn the materials and its will work in space easily . This idea is a gift for Nasa … Thank-you

46. Throw it all on the dark side….

47. I only got an idea for the food waste for the most part… We can put the scraps in this one chamber thingy filled with methane producing bacteria that can just eat up the scraps and leaves then white some energy to do simple stuff like heating up pans to cook on or maybe even heating their environment in general, that’s all my noggin can think of😁

48. you could make items to sell to the general public ..just in time for the holiday season

49. Made tons of typos, my bad. Fun nerding out!

50. Pack it in, pack it out. Please, write my check.

51. Use battery run grinders set for different materials. The powder can be mixed in cement to make building blocks. Human solid waste can be compacted and buried. Human liquid waste can be recycled by evaporation/ condensation methods. Recycling water used for everyday operations will require a disinfectant process/filter system and more (not easy to build for low gravity operations). Big equipment waste: dismantle and use parts to build new equipment. I am not sure what practical limitations will arise as they will arise. Then there are matters related to the volumes of material that must be recycled. Undoubtedly, much more thought and design of such plants will be required for each site. We have no ideas how the weather/ temperature changes on the moon will be affecting such a moon- recycling plant.

52. Gosh I’m in dire need for money if thr’s any help or any way to make more money! Problem Solved putting trash in Volcanos & not sure why we’re not already doin ths.

53. My idea, like a tiny trash compactor on the side of the vessel.. deep freeze it and shatter … Freezing it should be easy, your already in space, and a tiny squirt of liquid nitrogen should work fine I assume, and then use some electric engines to push rams to “shatter” whatever is in the mechanism, and release it . . . Unfathomable amount of tiny speaks of frozen stuff if flying around space fast and cold as hell… Just blend the trash in … utilize the environment, plus we already own tiny trash crushers, we’d just how to rebuild it with a liquid nitrogen spray system and electric rams Just my thoughts, waiting to clock in at work… 🙄

54. Can you not put it in a streamline combustible container, attach to vehicle upon return to earth and during decent detach that container during the burn up time during re-entry. Self combustible

55. Just Like in the woods ,You pack it ,You Pack ot out,if it’s good enough for us on earth it’s good enough for us in space.

56. Well, it cost a lot of money for every pound of payload transported into space. So destroying a single ounce of payload is foolish and defies logic. The intelligence and man powered involved to achieve getting any kind of payload into space is a feat of magnificent achievement. Keep this in mind people when expressing your comments on this issue.

57. They should recycle their Feces into Fertilizer high in Phosphorus and Nitrogen by mixing it with water and @@@, and use it to grow Super Healthy Blue algae like you find in the ocean. They can dilute there Urine to synthesize ocean water and have E.T. Super Penicilin. I was the Validictorian of Space Camp Summer B 1993. Also if tiles fall off the space ship or other parts of the ship they can use them as make shift patches if the “Enterpise Springs a Leak”.

58. On the moon there is no atmosphere. A solar array incinerator which in effect reflects all available light within a region to a single reflector tower, which in turn focuses the light into pure solar heat. The current system on earth subliminates radioactive material from nuclear plants and waste chemicals. That is with an atmosphere that blocks most of the light spectrum. In a vacuum that problem is negated. Recycle what you can, subliminate what you can’t. Even water can be obtained via this process pulling hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms off the exhaust then recombining them. In fact every element can be.

59. NASA needs to create a garbage grinder grinded up into a powder and and use it as a fuel source for lunar projects on the moon and to use it as a fuel source to travel to nearby far planets

60. I think we should send it straight to the sun send it to space and Lazer beam it towards the sun to make it go faster and the sun will take care of it.or another suggestion will be to send it to a star or planet that we can never go to and just use that planet or star just for garbage.but we need to start making people use the right garbage disposal for the right thing instead of just throwing anything in the garbage it can be sorted out into the right bin.

61. What if NASA would recycle it into an other parts for ISS space station or a rockets

62. NASA could recycle all that trash into parts for rockets or turn it into parts for ISS space station

63. All of these comments have serious flaws thrown into sun not reusable. Volcano toxic pollution and not reusable. Grind into powder creates micro particulates dangerous for life in low gravity. Incinerator would require o2 and fuel for a flame or a power source (also need fuel) if using Lazer, magnetic induction or full resistive load heating solar power is far too inefficient especially considering dust kicked up by human activity on the surface. Nuclear would require regular D2o shipments creating more waste defeating the purpose.

64. Also batteries don’t last forever the cells will die out meaning more waste and more shipping requirements.

65. Make a giant rake shovel and dust pan or dust bucket make it a space dump truck put a rock on the gas pedal or rocket pedal send that crap right into the sun or you can blow it to hell or shoot at it

66. I’m not so sure.About outer space, but I know here on earth.We can put our garbage waste that can’t be recycled or composed into active volcanoes.Where it would be recycled automatically

67. You should read a little more in depth, but they’re wanting is someone that can come up with a better idea for reusing and recycling materials, which is gold platinum stainless steel aluminum that’s just some of them, but they’re wanting ways to recycle and if possible, fabricate more tools and materials on the moon

68. Well, we can’t even figure out how to responsibly and economically manage our own waste on earth. We’ve been filling the surrounding orbital space around the earth and on the surface of the moon and other heavenly bodies for decades with debris from previous space missions and satellites. Anyways, make it a priority to build an orbiting waste vehicle from salvaged materials that have been sent to the moon. Make a dump run everytime a mission is going back to earth for supplies, people, etc. Once the waste vehicle is full, have a mission give a good push with a proper trajectory to the sun. It’ll make it there eventually. Poof…it’s 100% gone safely.

69. Radio wave can also be used in that recycling plant in the space ship to evaporate them. Besides this, you also can have other ways to evaporate them in that plant in you space ship.

70. Solar mirror powered incinerator

71. Send the trash to the Sun.
    Easily done.

72. Like many have said a very large incinerator is the only way to really go

73. Stop all the BS about getting to the moon which no person has been on it so there is no waste there as yet that humans always leave behind, they are The most worst garbage leave behind animals on our planet so keep away from any other planet or moons

74. Those idiots at NASA can’t even get their astronauts home safely. NASA is the perfect example of government incompetence.

75. Make everything that goes up their either edible or reusable. Have all the storage facilities put in place and when new shipments come in they come with nothing that’s considered garbage . Your going have to use raw sewage as fertilizer for crops being grown, and come up with a product made on the moon to be sold on earth so rockets can return home with a payload have transport that stays in space all the time they can parachute stuff back to earth and use a rocket to land on the moon.

76. There are some seriously big craters on the moon. I am almost positive hundreds of them could hold the entire waste output of the last 100 years and not fill up.

    Mass Driver compacted trash cubes into the sun or a grave yard orbit. Or fling them at mars at 60,000 kph to add heat to the environment.

    If we don’t send tons of plastic, glass, aluminum, titanium, and steel can all be recycled. Everything else, mostly poo and food waste can be burnt for heat/energy.

    Trash will be the least of the worries, getting rid of the waste heat generated by everything human will be the problem. I doubt they will be taking a drilling rig with them to sink the heat into the ground.

77. No need to spend $3 million. Just give any 6 year old a magnifying lens and some ants on a clear blue day. Watch for an half and hour and you’ll have the solution.

78. No things that burn put of smoke and other chemicals but depending on rocket fuel or an energy that you can use to run other things have a trash sorted and pour a chemical on it to be contained yet dissolve or waste after sorting compactor and let chemical break it down n possibly reuse what’s ever it come out chemical waste in a single bottle instead of trash heaps or a microorganisms that eats everything like leeleas dog nibbler on Futurama that can eat a bomb n never grow. Or ever think of fasting or a cleanse for so long to control their waste or what would consume less waste by eating this instead of that n doing vitamin supplements. I got a hundred of ideas like this

79. Having been in the recycling industry for 45 years I can tell you that there are several potential solutions. First we must understand the variety of items to be dealt with and then decide to recycle or destruction. From there the options can be evaluated based on economics and value of the end products. From an overall point of view it is a massive chemistry problem.

80. Throw it in a black hole…

81. What a massive waste of three million of our tax dollars!

82. Send it to India, they create all kinds of objects from their waste dumps!
    Or… How about banning plastic which isn’t healthy for anyone, and replace it with glass like the good ole days! People will recycle more then plastic because they used to give us actual money, 5¢ & 10¢ for bottles and jars, now a days they can offer gift cards, coupons etc. It’s time companies be held accountable for the mess they’ve created by cheaping out by using plastic instead of glass! No reason why they can’t go back to recycling their product’s container, it’ll create more jobs, healthier people and a cleaner planet….. The CEO might have to take a 10 million dollar bonus reduction, but isn’t it worth it in the long run?

83. Why can’t we develop space ships like in the series space 1999? Then the containers for products being taken to the moon could be reused for multiple missions as long as care was taken not to damage them. The best solution would be to create reusable containers, not throw away ones. A larger, more robust space station should be developed first as a staging point until a more viable method of escaping earth’s gravity can be achieved. Anti matter should be researched more, maybe there is some way to use it for anti gravity applications? Also, force fields would play an important part in the scheme of things. It all sounds like scifi, but look at star trek from the 60’s, self opening doors, communicators, and laser guns all now exist, anything is possible given the right amount of attention. We all need to stop fighting and work together though. Which should be the easiest thing to accomplish.

84. My idea would be a compartment outside the vehicle that would allow the waste to burn up on recently. Or a container that can be ejected before re-entry to burn up in atmosphere.

85. Where do I sign up? Have some ideas

86. Turn all into cardboard it will become fertilized back into the ground

87. Send the trash to the sun some way…let it burn it up…

88. Best option/s wud be;

    A) – starting point to phase1:
    * NASA should only be using “AI manpower” and “digital printing machines”. So, no human waste can be produce. Until such time arrived that we must bring humans to work and lived on the Moon. This way, can produce a very minimal waste…

    …After all of the above has been completed. Then and only then, we will be able to solve and produce the nessesary recycling machine/s for every kinds of wastes needed to be recycled…

    …’Till then..

89. Can I have my $3million now? Have a incinerator for bio waste, a person for separation of what can be recycle into pellets like plastics, glass or metal and for what can be used to go into fuel for rockets, to return to earth. Build a catapult to launch into the sun waste that not be reused.

90. NASA won’t be going to the moon any time soon as they have lost the skills to apparently do it, Or as some believe as in 1969 , they can just walk outside Stanley Kubrick’s film studio here on Earth and drop any Recycling into the green and blue bins