Surprisingly STEM: Space Waste Engineer

As the saying goes, “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure” and at NASA, Annie Meier is that person! Annie is a space waste engineer working on technologies to convert waste into vital resources for human space travel. Trash can be used to produce important gasses and even water – commodities astronauts traveling to another planet can’t just pick up along the way.

What is said in the film

So I grew up a few miles from New York City. And I was surrounded by a lot of people and a lot of trash. And it always fascinated me what we did with all of those materials. 8. 5 million people, what does trash day look like?

I was fascinated at what happens to all those materials and molecules. Like, funny enough, my grandfather was also a sanitation worker in the Bronx. And so there were lots of stories growing up of what it was like to be a sanitation worker in the city. But I think it's kind of intriguing that it kind of ran in the family. Waste collection in the Bronx, to now I'm figuring out how to process and-and recover the resources from waste for space.

Hi, I'm Annie Meier. I'm a chemical engineer at Kennedy Space Center. I work on resource recovery or in-situ resource utilization. And what that means is along space missions, we want to make sure we recover as many resources as possible that we have around us, or that we brought from our mission that becomes waste because we don't want to have to launch everything from Earth. How do we not throw things into the trash can in space?

And if we do throw them in the trash cans, how do we recover the resources? How do we get breathing oxygen or fuel or water out of that trash? So think of going on a very long trip in a car or on a plane. You would pack your luggage. You would fill up your car with whatever type of fuel it needs, but you would need to refill along the way, and that's using the resources that you have found.

So you don't have to have a giant suitcase or, you know, a car that's way too big to drive on a road. So for a 30 day mission on the moon, think of it as a long camping trip. You have four astronauts there, and they're accumulating trash. If we had a trash to gas technology, we could recover about six gallon jugs of water from the trash, as well as 16 scuba tanks worth of oxygen. So we try to figure out how we get the useful stuff out of the trash.

So there's two technologies that NASA's looking at right now. One is called the trash compaction processing system, where they take the trash and they crush it into tiles. And that would reduce the volume of the trash so you're not sitting around giant garbage bags of trash all the time. And the other one is the trash to gas, where we would recover the resources from it and try to do useful things. So things like the food packaging, the clothing they wear, the hygiene wipes they're wiping their face with, the toilet paper, the-the food that's left over in their food packaging, all those things that go into an astronaut's trash can, how do we get useful stuff out of them and what can we get out of them?

Well, they're primarily made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. And those compound-- those-those elements are building blocks of a lot of useful materials. So we try to convert some of those into a gas, which is a mixture of all different molecules. So we have carbon dioxide and methane, and all of these things are chemical soup that we pack into a bag or a container and we can pressurize and use as either fuel or separate them out and send them off to breathing air, if we purify it enough, and we also collect out water and any raw materials like aluminum. So a lot of our food packaging has an aluminum layer, and that aluminum can potentially get used for 3D printing new parts.

So we look at all the ways that that trash can become a resource instead of just sit inside a spacecraft and sit around the astronauts, because no one wants to sit around their trash. We're also looking at how do we deflect things from getting into the trash to begin with, and if they do end up in the trash, how do we process them so that they are more environmentally friendly and they're not hazardous? And what I love about this work is that a lot of it can tie back to the planet, and these technologies can be used to extract resources from things here on Earth. And so for me, not only are we trying to do this amazing stuff in space, on other planets, or on Mars missions, but also for our planet Earth, which to me is a core value of why I do what I do. So growing up in New York, I remember when it would rain.

We were on the south shore near the water, and my mom would tell us we can't go near the beach today because all of this garbage is on the beach. There could be needles, there could be hazardous substances. And that really confused me as a child. And I thought, "Why-- why is all this garbage in the water? " And so that's what triggered my curiosity of, you know, where is all this trash going?

Where is everyone's waste going? So that got me inclined to just think about how we reuse those resources and recover stuff and process it. And where does it all go? And that's what triggered my interest in-in chemical engineering. I was fascinated by my high school chemistry teacher who told me about atoms and molecules, and it made me kind of realize everything around us is made up of these materials that have chemical bonds.

And so when I was an undergrad studying engineering, I went to the Society of Women Engineers conference, and they have a lot of companies there that show up for a job fair, and I was too nervous to approach the booths or even talk to the people. So I kind of had to take some time and pep myself up. And I eventually walked up to the person standing there and humbly handed them my resume and said, "Here I am, I'd like to apply as a student," and I never thought I would even hear back anything. But I ended up getting two phone calls back from Kennedy Space Center, and here I am. So I would say, if you want to work in engineering, or science, or the space program, do not be intimidated.

I know I just told you I was intimidated, but you can do it. It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of studying, but if you really want to do something, you should give it all you have and try. So if you're not interested in the STEM field, or you think you're not good at math or you're not interested in math, I would say go where your curiosity drives you and you could still end up doing amazing things. Not everyone that works at the space program is a scientist or an engineer. This whole place runs by all different people and all different backgrounds here at Kennedy Space Center.

It's pretty much a city, and we have a fire department. We have health care workers. We have a media team. We have lawyers and business analysts and so many different majors that you don't necessarily have to be the-- the rocket scientist or, you know, the engineer that does it. And that journey-- that-that journey to get you there will still be amazing along the way and will land you somewhere great.

So don't give up. And there's a place for everyone.

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