Houston, we need! Or rather, Houston has a need, he needs us for the needs of astronauts: NASA has just launched the Lunarecycle Challenge (an international competition of 3 million dollars) aimed at anyone who manages to design a system to recycle feces and urine during space missions. Yes, everything is true, we are not talking about rockets but of poop and pee: just think that between 1969 and 1972 the astronauts of the Apollo missions left 96 bags of excrement on the moon (and since then no one has touched them anymore, of course). Now, however, you have to be ready as the Artemis mission aims to establish human colonies on the moon (and then use it as a base to go to Mars) and where do you put poop? I throw it there: in a crater? No, because the aim is to recycle it.
In any case, if you want to participate in the 3 million dollar challenge, there are two phases: in the first ideas are presented, prototypes are made in the second. Of course, it is a challenge open to anyone, but I suppose you have to be at least biologists or space engineers, I would be like Benigni and Troisi in we just have to cry, when they think of all the inventions they could do in 1492, coming from the future, and in the end they fold on the toilet: “But the one, however, how it works? “It’s the principle of communicating vases right?” “Can you do it?” “No”. Then (not negligible detail) we have not yet solved the problem of cosmic radiation for long stays: space is carcinogenic. But at least it will be sanitized. At most I could write to NASA: use the feces like Matt Damon in the Martian, as fertilizer, to cultivate potatoes? They will have already thought about it.
Piero Manzoni and his ingenious artist shit boxes also come to mind. In 1961 he made 90, and in the same year Kennedy announced the goal of bringing the man to the moon by the end of the decade: his signature would have been enough to solve the problem, recycled needs in works of art, unfortunately Piero died in 1963 and I would have been willing to be the artist in space.
Fun fact: the 96 lunar bags not of an artist but of astronaut at the moment certainly contained live intestinal bacteria, now no longer: the moon conditions (absence of atmosphere, radiation, emptiness, extreme temperatures, and it is not that on Mars it is a lot
better) are lethal for any form of land life (apart from the Tardigradi). Today those bags are biologically sterile: at least on the moon the bacteria have not multiplied, unlike the conspiracy theories.