UNITED STATES, REQNews – The United States Space Agency or NASA is reportedly holding a public contest with prizes for those who can design a toilet for use in Month.
Quoted from the Guardian, Monday, June 28, 2020, this prize has a prize of up to US $ 35,000. NASA requested that innovators be able to design the best toilets that would work not only in micro-grading but also on the surface of the Moon,
“This is clearly not the main focus of the mission,” said Mike Interbartolo of NASA.
“We will not return to the moon so we can say we defecated on the moon, but we also do not want a difficult situation like that.”
Interbartolo, is the project manager for the Lunar Loo Challenge, a NASA competition launched on Thursday 25 June 2020 which hopes to attract new and innovative solutions to the problem of accommodating human waste in space.
Participants will contribute to design toilet technology aimed at Artemis, NASA’s program to land the first woman and the next man on the moon in 2024.
Space toilet technology has come a long way from the gloomy times of Apollo, when bags had to be stuck to astronauts’ bottoms in settings that were not always as safe as expected. There is dirt floating in the air.
The international space station (ISS) has a large toilet made in Russia that looks like an industry that uses suction technology to overcome the challenges of defecating and urinating in microgravity. However, NASA is looking for something that will function equally well on the surface of the Moon, where gravity is only one sixth on Earth.
“We really don’t want people to just say we know what an ISS toilet is like, so we let go of a little mass and make it more concise,” Interbartolo said. “We are looking for unusual (designs) … We want to take advantage of thinkers, a community of space makers, and see what is not known out there.”
Prospective innovators must meet NASA technical specifications. Their design must be lighter than 15 kg in Earth’s gravity, no larger than 0.12 m 3 and no more noisy than the average bathroom fan, and must be able to safely meet all the needs of female and male toilet users.
“In addition, the toilet design must be able to accommodate sick crew members who deal with vomiting and diarrhea. Bonus points will be given to designs that can catch vomiting without requiring crew members to put their heads on the toilet,” NASA said.
The elegance of their design and ability to gain some level of privacy in a small flight module will also be considered.
NASA’s Artemis-3 mission, which has a launch target of 2024, aims to land a man and a woman at the south pole of the moon. This will be the first time that astronauts have traveled to the lunar surface since 1972.
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