A mobile wastewater treatment system, developed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, has departed Florida for testing at the University of North Dakota, in preparation for long-duration missions on the Moon and Mars. Graduate students at the university will evaluate the technology under conditions designed to closely mimic the challenges of operating on another planet’s surface.
The Divergent Deployable Wastewater Treatment Facility is engineered to transform crew wastewater into valuable resources that future explorers will require daily. At the University of North Dakota, teams will integrate this novel wastewater system with the university’s Integrated Lunar/Mars Analog Habitat. Student operators and NASA researchers will examine how the facility performs when connected to a habitat-like environment and subjected to operational limitations that a crew might encounter on another planet.
“NASA’s Artemis program is laying the groundwork for a sustainable human presence on the Moon. Habitats in this environment will need to operate away from a stable supply chain supporting astronauts in partial gravity,” said Luke Roberson, surface water systems lead in the Mars Campaign Office. “To solve this challenge, we are developing the future of sustainable lunar surface systems that convert wastewater into nutrient sources for plants and bioregeneration.”
Housed within an 8.5-by-24-foot trailer, the facility integrates three bioreactor systems, a vertical garden, water-purifying hardware, environmental monitoring, autonomous control software, and safety systems. The trailer was outfitted at NASA Kennedy to function as a deployable laboratory and travel between at least two simulated test sites as the technology matures.
Unlike wastewater systems on Earth, this facility keeps waste streams separate. This divergent approach is important for small crews because wastewater from four to eight people can be highly concentrated. Urine, hygiene water, flush water, fecal waste, and food waste contain varying levels of salts, solids, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other compounds. Treating them separately ensures each stream is processed by the most suitable reactor for the job.
To accomplish this, the system utilizes three different bioreactors to process waste streams. The Anaerobic Phototrophic Membrane Bioreactor processes fecal and food wastes, converting them into nutrient-rich wastewater that can support plant growth. The Suspended Aerobic Membrane Bioreactor processes urine and flush water. The Membrane Aerated Biological Reactor purifies grey water from hygiene and laundry activities. Collectively, the bioreactors process nutrients to feed the facility’s vertical garden and prepare water for reuse. In this garden, produce will be grown hydroponically, or without soil, using nutrient solutions derived from the bioreactors. Researchers will compare produce performance to plants grown with standard hydroponic nutrients.
In North Dakota, the facility is connected to the Integrated Lunar/Mars Analog Habitat via a bathroom interface that includes a urine-diverting toilet, under a NASA EPSCoR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) grant. This setup will allow for the separation of different waste streams at the source and their routing to the appropriate treatment systems. In parallel, Ali Alshami’s team is developing innovative membrane-based separation technologies designed for future integration into the divergent wastewater facility to increase water recovery efficiency, contaminant rejection, and overall system resilience for long-duration habitat missions.
“The tests will help NASA evaluate real-world operations, crew training needs, system reliability, and how wastewater simulants compare to actual human metabolic waste in an analog mission environment,” Alshami said.
These efforts focus on developing compact, energy-efficient treatment approaches capable of processing the complex wastewater streams generated in closed-loop space environments.
“The test campaign in North Dakota supports the facility’s technology maturation from the laboratory-scale validation phase to demonstration in the relevant Inflatable Lunar/Mars Analog Habitat environment,” said Pablo De Leon, director and professor of the University of North Dakota’s Space Studies Department.
Lessons learned could inform future higher-fidelity tests, including potential integration with NASA’s next generation of annual simulated Mars missions through isolation analogs at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
This work is part of NASA’s broader Bioregenerative Life Support Systems efforts, which develop biological approaches to reduce dependence on consumables supplied from Earth. In future lunar or Martian habitats, systems like the wastewater treatment facility could help close life support loops by recovering water, recycling nutrients, supporting crop production, and reducing the amount of waste that needs to be stored or discarded. Additional research completed by NASA has conducted impact studies showing how bioregenerative life support is becoming more effective in space travel compared to existing life support technologies.
NASA researchers are also investigating how resources recovered from wastewater could support in-space manufacturing processes. One study examines how nutrient-rich water from bioregenerative wastewater systems could feed microorganisms that produce lactic acid, which can then be converted into polylactic acid. This material could serve as a binder for 3D printing with lunar or Martian regolith in the future, or be used for spare parts, thus extending the value of recovered waste beyond water and food systems.
“By sending the facility from NASA Kennedy to North Dakota, the agency is moving a critical piece of this circular economy from the lab to real-world testing,” said J.J. Edelmann, surface systems field lead for the Mars Campaign Office at NASA Headquarters. “The study may start with wastewater, but its objective is much larger. We want future crews to live sustainably on the Moon, learn to operate farther from Earth, and carry those lessons to Mars.”
