spacetoday.net: NASA announces new prize competition

Posted: Fri, May 20, 2005, 6:07 AM ET (1007 GMT)
NASA

NASA announced Thursday a prize competition to develop technology that can extract oxygen from lunar soil. The Moon Regolith Oxygen, or MoonROx, competition offers $250,000 to the first team that can create breathable oxygen from simulated lunar regolith. The competition, which expires on June 1, 2008, requires teams to develop hardware that can produce five kilograms of oxygen from the regolith simulant during an eight-hour period. Such technology would prove useful to any future human habitat on Mars, as well as the production of oxidizer for lunar lander spacecraft. The competition, run in cooperation with the Florida Space Research Institute, is the latest in the agency's Centennial Challenges prize program; NASA announced prizes related to space elevator technology development earlier this year.