MIT student team CERBERUZ wins NASA LunaRecycle Centennial Challenge, turning lunar trash into treasure
Establishing a human presence on the Moon will require state-of-the-art spacecraft, spacesuits, life-support systems, and some of the most sophisticated technology humans have ever built. It will also require figuring out where to put the garbage.
A future lunar outpost will receive a steady stream of supplies from Earth, bringing packaging and other materials that could quickly become a mountain of waste. Meanwhile, astronauts will need tools, replacement parts, and materials to maintain the outpost, and sending those supplies from Earth is extraordinarily expensive. An MIT student team has won first prize in a NASA competition for developing a way to turn that trash into useful materials for lunar living.
The Composites for Extraterrestrial Recycling By Engineering the Reuse and Upcycling of Zotek (CERBERUZ) team was named first prize winner in both the Prototype and Digital Twin tracks of NASA’s LunaRecycle Challenge. The Challenge asked participants to design and develop recycling solutions that can reduce space waste and improve the sustainability of longer-term lunar missions. Teams were encouraged to envision solutions that not only addressed recycling in deep space, but ones that could also have applications on Earth.
The CERBERUZ team’s solution grinds mixed trash into fine powder and uses Zotek F30, a closed-cell foam widely used in aerospace packaging, as a reinforcement agent to convert the mixture into feed for injection-mold finished parts or 3D printing filament. Their approach could be used to transform waste into tools, life-support components, and other essential items for a lunar outpost.
“Waste packaging materials will inevitably accumulate when a lunar outpost is built, and at the same time, outpost construction and maintenance will require a steady supply of new materials, including replacement parts,” says George Lordos, a research scientist in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the lead advisor for the CERBERUZ team. “Recycling waste materials into such parts can help reduce materials needed to be launched from Earth.”
Turning trash into tools
The idea behind in-situ resource utilization technologies like CERBERUZ is relatively simple: take local materials that would otherwise become waste, grind them down, and turn them into raw materials that can be used in manufacturing. The challenge is that mixed thermoplastics and thermoset foams like Zotek F30 have no established recycling solutions, even on Earth. CERBERUZ mechanically breaks down materials into fine powders, incorporating the Zotek as reinforcement rather than separating it out as waste.
The team designed the process around the constraints of operating far from Earth. Because CERBERUZ uses mechanical methods powered by electricity, it doesn’t rely on water-intensive recycling processes or chemical depolymerization, and produces no secondary chemical waste. This could allow packaging and other materials delivered to a lunar outpost to become a local source of manufacturing feedstock, giving astronauts the ability to produce needed items from material they already have on hand.
“We set out to build something that could actually work on the Moon, not just in a lab,” says Lanie McKinney, a graduate student in AeroAstro and team lead for CERBERUZ. “That means no water and no chemicals you can’t replace. Every design choice we made was driven by those constraints. And we don’t want to recycle just for recycling’s sake; we want to make useful things. Part of how we framed the problem was to create a system that can process nearly any feedstock and turn it into a wide array of components, giving more utility than producing a single item.”
Alongside the physical recycling system, the team developed DEIMOS, or Digital Environment for Intelligent Modeling of Operational Systems, a digital twin of its injection molding machine. Using data collected during actual production runs, DEIMOS models how different combinations of recycled materials and part geometries will behave during manufacturing, predicting factors including mold fill, warpage, and shrinkage risk. Ultimately, the digital twin could help astronauts determine how recycled materials will perform before committing limited resources to manufacturing a part on the Moon.
Where ideas become hardware
The CERBERUZ team grew out of the MIT Space Resources Workshop, a co-curricular initiative of students passionate about designing, building, and testing systems to support future Moon and Mars exploration. Founded in 2017, the Workshop is well known for building teams that take on – and conquer – grand challenges in NASA-sponsored competitions.
The CERBERUZ team brings together undergraduate and graduate students from four MIT departments: Aeronautics and Astronautics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Materials Science and Engineering. Team advisors include Lordos; Professor John Hart; and Professor Jeffrey Hoffman, a former NASA astronaut.
“What impresses me most about this team is the quality of leadership,” says Lordos. “Lanie McKinney has been an outstanding team lead, and the co-leads — Palak Patel on manufacturing and materials characterization, Lilly Etzenbach on the digital twin, and Jose Soto on pre-processing — have each built and managed subteams doing cutting-edge research in lunar sustainability.”
The win caps nearly two years of work on the Challenge. CERBERUZ was selected as a Phase 1 winner in 2025 before advancing through Phase 2 and earning milestone prizes in both tracks on its way to the final demonstration in summer 2026.
CERBERUZ Team:
Sophia Augier
Sophie Berkvist
Ariella Blackman
Keira Boone
Constantine Bulavenko
Seth Burrowes
Andrew Chen
Alex Chen
Chris Choe
Johnson Cristales
Brady Cruse
Hillel Dei
Natalie Hatzigeorgiu
Intia Ibnah
Avishai Jeselsohn
Uma Kirk
Christopher Kwon
Jessica Meza
Juan Orrego
Giuliana Pertuz
Jordan Prawira
Brandy Romine
Dustin Wang
Madison Wood
Adrian Yang
Team leads:
Lanie McKinney
Palak B. Patel
Lilly Etzenbach
Jose Soto
Mollie Johnson
Faculty Advisors:
George Lordos
Prof. Jeffrey Hoffman
