"I won a NASA contest to motivate my children."

BarcelonaSeven years ago, María Jesús Puerta Angulo was diagnosed with breast cancer during a routine check-up and is still battling the disease today. She is feeling better and hopes to be discharged soon, but explains that getting here has been a complicated path, especially because she has combined it with raising her children, both teenagers. The treatment and constant visits to specialists took a great toll on her physically and emotionally, but one day she saw a NASA competition announced for an innovative project to recycle waste from the Moon. She signed up to encourage her children to pursue their goals, no matter how many difficulties they encountered along the way, and she was extremely surprised when she discovered she had won.

"I told them I would apply and that I would do a project good enough for NASA to consider. I was trying to be theirs." influencer, like when they were little, to motivate them to be their best and do everything they set out to do. And not only that, but I also won. I was the only winner in the international category," explains María Jesús, a mining engineer and the recent winner of the US space agency's competition, with a laugh. The competition was attended by 1,200 projects from 80 different countries. There was a category reserved for participants from the United States and another for the Puerta bat, among them Hope, he highlighted.

If history has any but, is that the prize had a prize fund of three million euros and the Catalan engineer cannot collect it. "The rules of the prize were very long, I looked at the technical part and said to myself: 'You can do this.' What I didn't see was that the money was only for winners from the United States and international winners weren't eligible. It wasn't the small print, it was clearly stated, but since it wasn't for the money, I didn't get it. That's why she downplays it because, she insists, the purpose of all this was to shock her children, aged 18 and 16, and not to win money.

Making "moon concrete"

Puerta has created a model using real data from the Moon that has demonstrated, through simulations, its capacity to recycle the waste found on our satellite. NASA informed contest participants that they had to dispose of approximately 4,200 kilograms of waste categorized by material, and she devised an "efficient" method to make this possible. The idea of the project is to combine this waste with minerals from the Moon to create new products, such as "lunar concrete." However, her model made it possible to reduce the amount of waste to just 50 kg. "The rest is used," the engineer maintains.

The first phase consisted of conducting a digital simulation of the project, and the second was to create the prototype. However, NASA has changed the rules and now only projects from the United States can be submitted, so if she wants to participate, she must do so in partnership with a company from across the Atlantic. Furthermore, she would not be able to participate as the project leader, so she is currently considering whether or not to participate. However, he doesn't rule out pursuing the project outside of the competition if companies are interested in developing it. "In any case, what had to happen has already happened, which was to show my children that I could do it. I'm sure they'll remember it for the rest of their lives," he concludes.