NASA awarded a Texas Tech University professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering a $500,000 three-year incremental grant.
“We’ve been helping NASA try to figure out this issue for many, many years. We have come out with new reactor designs that work in microgravity, which is difficult to do,” said William Andrew Jackson, the engineering professor conducting the study.
NASA Shared Services Center gave Jackson the grant to continue his work on the “biological treatment of space-based waste for desalination to allow the water to be reused for drinking water,” said a statement released from the university.
For 16 years, Jackson worked alongside Audra Morse – a former Texas Tech professor now at Michigan Tech – on the project.
This process will allow 99 percent of the water sent on a space mission to be recycled, making missions to Mars much more possible, said the statement.
This project makes space travel “more cost effective, more reliable and more robust,” said Jackson.
There are many steps to the process. In three years, he hopes to “gain the confidence” of NASA that the bioreactor works, so they can move on to a test flight into space.
They must find a way to control the reactor independent of other systems, contain the biohazardous waste, and test the reactor in non-gravitational environments, he explained.
Their hope is to “make life on Mars able to be sustainable in terms of multi-year missions, instead of spending a lot of money on chemicals or transporting the supplies. The biology is self-regenerating. They grow themselves and never die,” said Jackson.