Yes, seriously. NASA is on the lookout for a toilet to boldly go where no toilet has gone before, with the launch of the Lunar Loo Challenge.
The American space agency plans to send humans back to the moon by 2024, and needs facilities in place for astronauts to answer nature’s call along the trip there and back.
NASA has a couple of ideas they’re working on, which basically involve miniaturising and streamlining their existing toilet systems.
But they’ve put a call out to the global community with the hope of finding a new and different approach to the problem.
It’s a little more complicated than setting a Portaloo up in the lunar module however.
The toilet needs to be a design that can work both in orbit while astronauts are weightless and on the moon’s surface when they’re experiencing one-sixth of Earth’s gravity.
Entries to close on August 17, 2020 – with US$35,000 going to the winning idea, there’s plenty at stake.
