NASA’s “Break the Ice” challenge looks for ideas to assist with future lunar missions

By 2024, NASA’s Artemis program is expected to land a man and a woman on the lunar surface. To help with a long-term sustained presence on the moon for years to come, NASA will need to tap into on-site resources rather than rely on supplies from Earth. It turns out that the lunar regolith is rich in life-support potential, but collecting these materials in the harsh lunar environment presents numerous engineering challenges.

On Wednesday, NASA announced that it was seeking innovative strategies to help the agency excavate the lunar regolith and subsequently deliver this material to a theoretical regolith processing facility located on the moon’s south pole. NASA’s Break the Ice Lunar Challenge is currently open for registration to help the space agency develop capabilities to eventually support a sustained human lunar presence by 2030.

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“As outlined in our plan for sustained lunar exploration and development, NASA is pursuing the development of technology that allows future explorers to live on the earth. With this challenge, we are soliciting new ideas outside the traditional aerospace industry to acquiring and processing the resources necessary to support long-term human surface exploration, “said Jim Reuter, NASA’s associate administrator for the direction of the space technology mission, in a press release

Overall, Break the Ice Lunar Challenge consists of two phases. As part of Phase 1, NASA is looking for proposals for “a system architecture capable of excavating and moving frozen regolith and water on the lunar surface.”

To compete for a portion of Phase 1’s $ 500,000 prize pool, entrants will need to submit an excavation plan, a report describing their system architecture, and an animation of the mission no later than June 18, 2021. These materials will need to deal with a myriad of operations and environmental factors related to a hypothetical lunar excavation mission, according to NASA.

Phase 2 exists as a demonstration phase based on “promising” Phase 1 presentations detailing “viable approaches to achieving the challenge goals” with a prize pool of up to $ 4.5 million, for NASA.

NASA is particularly interested in technologies that use lunar resources to enable sustainable surface operations with fewer Earth-supported supply needs. Such innovations would include the conversion of ice on the moon to drinking water, rocket fuel and other resources.

As part of the challenge announcement, NASA notes a number of technology gaps associated with the collection and transport of large amounts of lunar resources to the site; namely designing hardware robust enough to withstand the extreme temperatures on the moon. The robotic excavation equipment will have to operate in “permanently shaded regions” at the south pole of the moon where the researchers observed the ice.

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“Responsibly harvesting these resources in a place away from our home planet will require new technologies,” John Vickers, NASA’s chief technologist for the challenge, said in a news release. “Someday we may be able to incentivize the excavation of regolith and water delivery technologies that could be adapted for operation on the lunar surface, while also advancing excavation technologies for terrestrial commercialization.”

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