NASA has asked entrepreneurs and inventors to come up with a toilet and recycling system that can handle the waste of astronauts making a nine-month trip to Mars. The corresponding competition is held in partnership with the HeroX crowdsourcing platform and is called WasteToBase.

Ideas for recycling garbage, biowaste, carbon dioxide recycling and foam packaging materials during manned two- or three-year missions to Mars are expected from the contestants by March 15, and the winner must be announced by April 22. As a result, it is supposed to give away several prizes up to $1,000 each, with a total fund of the contest of $24,000.

“The challenge is to find ways to convert waste into base materials and other useful things like fuel or 3D printing feedstock,” the award’s website says. “The challenge is to figure out how to convert various wastes into fuels and other useful materials, which can then be turned into useful things and recycled many times over again. While a perfectly efficient cycle is unlikely, the desired solution should lead to waste minimization.” The full requirements are available on the competition website, but anyone in the world aged 18 or over can, in principle, test their mettle either individually or as part of a team in this competition, unless their place of jurisdiction is under U.S. federal sanctions, they said. in HeroX.

The winning ideas are expected to be included in a whitepaper as "part of a roadmap for future technology development work" for NASA's Mars project. Although the exact timing of sending people to Mars has not yet been set, NASA suggests that it will be able to get there by the mid-2030s. In the short term, the agency hopes to send astronauts to the moon as part of the Artemis mission by the mid-2020s. The experience of flights to the Moon will in turn help in the development of future missions to Mars.

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