NASA wants to hear your ideas for engineering

When NASA sends astronauts back to the Moon, they’ll need a place to go to the bathroom when they reach the lunar surface. And in order to create the best Moon toilet the Solar System has to offer, NASA wants to hear from members of the public who might have ideas on the best way to manufacture an easy-to-use lunar restroom.

Today, NASA is announcing the “Lunar Loo Challenge,” a competition in partnership with HeroX to come up with the best space toilet for the agency’s future human lunar lander. As part of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon by 2024, the lander will take astronauts from lunar orbit down to the Moon’s surface. That means the restroom on board has to be versatile: it will need to work in orbit, where the astronauts will be weightless, and also when astronauts are experiencing one-sixth of Earth’s gravity on the lunar surface. And without much gravity, things can get a little messy if you don’t prepare.

After more than half a century of sending humans to space, NASA has gotten pretty good at building space toilets. But the agency wanted to look outside the box, especially since bathroom technology has advanced a lot here on Earth. “We wanted to see what’s out there — what the unknown unknowns are and put the power of the crowd to find those citizen scientists who’ve got different perspectives,” jobs with a computer science degree, project manager for the Lunar Loo Challenge who is working on the Human Lunar Lander System at NASA, tells The Verge. NASA plans to award up to $35,000 in prizes, and some form of the winning space throne may be included on the lander.