A team led by Bob Jones University engineering faculty member Dr. Bill Lovegrove earned a $50,000 prize in NASA’s LunaRecycle Challenge, a national competition focused on developing innovative recycling technologies for future lunar and deep-space missions.
NASA’s LunaRecycle Challenge is a $3 million competition administered through NASA’s Centennial Challenges Program in partnership with the University of Alabama. The challenge encourages the development of technologies that can transform mission waste into useful materials, helping sustain a long-term human presence on the Moon and reducing dependence on resupply missions. NASA is pursuing these solutions as part of its broader efforts to support future lunar exploration. The competition challenges participants to develop ways to recycle and repurpose materials such as plastics, fabrics, foams, and metals that would otherwise become waste during long-duration lunar missions.
Lovegrove initially entered the competition independently and then invited BJU students to join the project team. The 11-member team developed LunaBrix, a recycling process that combines various recycled waste materials with lunar soil to create construction bricks for future lunar habitats.
The team’s proposal advanced through Phase 1 of the competition, earning a $25,000 milestone award and a place among the finalists selected to compete in the final round. The team reinvested the Phase 1 funding into the project’s continued development and testing.
During the summer, five BJU engineering students devoted two weeks to advancing the project before Lovegrove and students Jonas Barker and Micah Shelton traveled to the University of Alabama Lee J. Styslinger Jr. College of Engineering in August to present their work alongside other finalist teams from across the United States.
“As a university, we don’t do research just for research’s sake,” said Lovegrove. “Our focus is teaching. Opportunities like this give students a chance to work through real problems and learn by doing. Winning a prize is exciting, but helping students grow through the experience is the primary goal.”
“It was a huge privilege to go and compete in a NASA competition,” said Shelton. “I was grateful for the chance to see how the theory we’ve been learning in class could be applied in a setting like this. It was eye-opening. Before you get there, it can all feel over your head, but once you’re in the room, you realize the people doing this work are people just like you. That gave me a lot of confidence and made opportunities like this feel more within reach.”
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team earned first place overall in the competition. The BJU team received a $50,000 award recognizing its ability to recycle and repurpose the greatest variety of waste materials among the finalist teams. To learn more about LunaRecycle, visit: www.nasa.gov/lunarecycle.
