NASA's Glenn Research Center has developed a composite material that blends a biodegradable plastic — produced inside bacteria fed crew waste or CO₂ — with simulated Moon and Mars dust. The resulting material is stronger and more processable than the plastic alone, with tunable properties depending on dust type and ratio. The gray-toned samples use lunar regolith simulant; the reddish samples use Martian simulant. The work was led by research chemical engineer Allison Christy alongside summer interns Tyler Klinchuch, Ethan Bilodeau, and Emma Levenson. The core insight is biological: the plastic "literally grows within the bacteria's little bodies," as Christy put it, meaning feedstock could be generated from waste streams already present in a crewed habitat. Mix that with the most abundant local resource — regolith — and you have a fabrication feedstock that requires almost no Earth-launched mass. The target applications are interior habitat hardware: structural brackets, wrenches, chairs, and repair parts. The operating logic is straightforward. Every kilogram launched to the lunar surface costs tens of thousands of dollars. If crews can fabricate and recycle tools from local materials plus biological waste, resupply missions shrink and mission independence grows. This directly supports NASA's stated objective of a permanent Moon base. The material is now in two validation pipelines. Glenn's Lunar Environment Structural Test Rig is subjecting samples to extreme temperature cycling. Separately, several samples are slated for the Materials International Space Station Experiment 23 (MISSE-23), which will expose them to the full radiation and thermal environment outside the ISS. These tests will determine whether the composite can serve exterior as well as interior functions. The open question is durability in vacuum, radiation, and thermal extremes — conditions that degrade most polymers rapidly. Interior use is a lower bar; exterior structural service on the lunar surface is a much harder requirement. The MISSE-23 results will be the first real data point. Funding comes through NASA Glenn's 2026 Center Innovation Fund, managed by the Research and Technology Mission Directorate. This is small-scale internal R&D money — not a major program line — which is appropriate for a material still in the simulant-and-lab-bench phase. The path from microscope images to load-bearing lunar hardware is long, but the underlying economics of in-situ resource utilization make even incremental progress worth tracking. The generative logic here is sound: reduce launch mass, close waste loops, increase crew autonomy. The risk is that space-environment testing reveals failure modes that confine the material to low-stress interior parts — useful, but not transformative. Watch the MISSE-23 data.
