Composites for Extraterrestrial Recycling By Engineering the Reuse and Upcycling of Zotek

CERBERUZ is a phase 1 winner of the NASA LunaRecycle Centennial Challenge!

The challenge tasked teams with designing recycling solutions for non-metabolic waste that would accumulate over long-duration lunar missions. Our concept, CERBERUZ, utilizes hard-to-recycle foam panels as a reinforcing filler material to create novel thermoplastic-matrix composite materials. Our manufacturing ecosystem includes injection molding, filament extrusion, and casting, allowing us to recycle plastics, foam, and metals into standard parts and additive manufacturing feedstock, and leverages ISRU to create regolith molds. To improve the material quality of manufactured parts, we’re also testing nonthermal plasma technology to clean items prior to recyling.

This concept spans themes of space-sustainability, in-space manufacturing, and in-situ resource utilization — all major technology developments necessary for Lunar and Mars exploration and a growing cislunar economy. Space sustainability is both our responsibility as a spacefaring species and a mission enabler — longer duration missions to the Moon and Mars can be accomplished and allow humans to thrive when they have the ability to flexibly “build” and “make” things from the resources already available.

I co-led the concept development and proposal submission for CERBERUZ. Our team is comprised of students who met through the Space Resources Workshop at MIT.

We are thrilled to have been awarded 75k to begin building and testing prototypes of CERBERUZ in phase II of the challenge! Also, you can see the official announcement of the winners of both the prototype build and digital twin track here. More details about competition winners can be found here.