MIT student team CERBERUZ wins NASA LunaRecycle Centennial Challenge, turning lunar trash into tools.
An MIT student team called CERBERUZ won first prize in both the Prototype and Digital Twin tracks of NASA's LunaRecycle Challenge with a system that turns lunar mission waste into usable composite parts.
An MIT student team has taken first prize in NASA's LunaRecycle Challenge, part of the agency's Centennial Challenges series. The team, Composites for Extraterrestrial Recycling By Engineering the Reuse and Upcycling of Zotek (CERBERUZ), won in both the Prototype and Digital Twin tracks. The challenge asked participants to design ways to reuse, recycle, or upcycle space waste and make longer lunar missions more sustainable.
The team's system sorts non-biological waste into two streams: thermoplastics and everything else. All of it is ground into a fine powder and mixed. The mixture goes into an injection molding machine, where the thermoplastics melt around the other materials. The blend is then injected into a mold to make composite parts that can be reproduced quickly and reliably.
The team gave particular attention to Zotek F30, a closed-cell thermoset foam common in aerospace packaging. According to MIT, mixed thermoplastics and thermoset foams like Zotek have no established recycling solutions, even on Earth. CERBERUZ uses the Zotek as a reinforcing filler in the molten feedstock. The foam is so light that large volumes are needed to yield a useful mass of material.
The process relies on electrically powered mechanical methods. It does not need water-intensive recycling or chemical depolymerization, and it produces no secondary chemical waste. "We set out to build something that would actually make sense on the moon, not just in a lab," said team lead Lanie McKinney, a graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics.
The team also built DEIMOS, a digital twin of its injection molding machine. Using data from real production runs, it models how combinations of recycled materials and part shapes will behave, predicting mold fill, warpage, and shrinkage risk. MIT says this could help astronauts judge how recycled material will perform before they spend limited resources on a part.
The win follows nearly two years of work. CERBERUZ was a Phase 1 winner in 2025, advanced through Phase 2 with milestone prizes in both tracks, and gave its final demonstration in summer 2026. The team earned $925,000 in total and hopes to reinvest it in the MIT Space Resources Workshop, which it grew out of, to fund equipment and facilities for future teams.
At a Glance
- CERBERUZ won first prize in both the Prototype and Digital Twin tracks of NASA's LunaRecycle Challenge.
- The team earned $925,000 in prize money over the course of the challenge.
- CERBERUZ was a Phase 1 winner in 2025 and gave its final demonstration in summer 2026.
- The team includes students from four MIT departments and grew out of the Space Resources Workshop, founded in 2017.
- DEIMOS, the team's digital twin, predicts mold fill, warpage, and shrinkage risk for recycled-material parts.
Sources
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