NASA's Break the Ice Challenge semi-finals

With 2022 coming to a close, NASA has announced the 15 teams moving forward to the semi-finals in the $3.5 million Break the Ice Lunar Challenge, an ongoing competition that puts research groups, robotics teams, and private companies in head-to-head trials to design future-tech rovers to harvest the most valuable commodity of all in outer space, water.

"We're putting humanity back on the Moon with the Artemis missions, and this is a team effort on a global scale," said Amy Kaminski, program executive for prizes, challenges, and crowdsourcing in NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. "Challenges like Break the Ice are one more way for creative thinkers around the world to participate, by helping us learn to 'live off that land' and turn local resources into useful products like water, building materials, and even rocket fuel."

The first phase of this competition challenged solvers to design a robotic system for digging and moving large quantities of icy Moon "dirt" or regolith, found in the coldest, darkest places on the lunar surface.

You can read about last year's winners at NASA Break the Ice Challenge winners in the August 25, 2021 edition of Metal Tech News.

A total of 25 teams submitted entries for the qualifying round of the phase-two competition, which kicked off in June.

A panel of government, industry, and academic experts in in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) evaluated teams' entries and selected 15 winners of the second phase of the Break the Ice Lunar Challenge based on submissions of detailed technical reports, engineering designs, and test plans.

The teams moving to the semifinal round are:

• Aurora Robotics from Fairbanks, Alaska.

• Cislune Excavators, from Alhambra, California.

• Ice Busters from Olathe, Kansas.

• Lunar Wombats from Seattle, Washington.

• Michigan Technological University's Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab from Houghton, Michigan.

• Moog Inc. from Elma, New York.

• Moon Industry Inc. from the Netherlands.

• Offworld Robotic Mining Team from Aldie, Virginia.

• Redwire Space from Jacksonville, Florida – and the 2021 winner of the Break the Ice Challenge.

• Space Trajectory from Brookings, South Dakota.

• Starpath from San Francisco, California.

• Team xTrac Planetoid Mines from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

• Team Chandra from Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India.

• Terra Engineering from Gardena, California.

• The Ice Diggers from Golden, Colorado.

These 15 teams will move on to build and test full-size prototypes in level two. The 13 U.S. teams in this group will receive equal shares of NASA's $500,000 prize purse from level one.

Teams that make it to level three will put their prototypes to the test in head-to-head onsite competition for a shot at $1.5 million in prizes.

"As we work towards a sustained human presence on the Moon, we are committed to enabling the development and demonstration of new technologies to support the infrastructure needed for long-term human presence," said Denise Morris, acting Centennial Challenges program manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "Technologies and hardware from the Break the Ice Lunar Challenge will get us one step closer to excavating icy regolith on the lunar surface, providing critical water resources and excavation activities needed to build the infrastructure on the Moon."

NASA's Break the Ice Lunar Challenge is a Centennial Challenge led by Marshall Space Flight Center and the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Centennial Challenges are part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing program within NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. Ensemble Consultancy supports the management of competitors for this challenge.

For more information on the Break the Ice Lunar Challenge, click here.