Space

Will Taubenheim Wins NASA LunaRecycle Prototype Track and People's Choice

Will Taubenheim's team won the NASA LunaRecycle Challenge prototype track and People's Choice at the Alabama finale, NASA's largest Centennial Challenge with more than 1,200 competing companies and teams.

Will Taubenheim

Will Taubenheim

Lost Frame Ventures

Key facts

  • Will Taubenheim's team won the NASA LunaRecycle Challenge prototype track at the August 2026 finale in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
  • The team also won the People's Choice Award, voted by the public on the day they presented at the technology showcase.
  • More than 1,200 companies and teams entered, making LunaRecycle NASA's largest Centennial Challenge.
  • The winning system is Lunar Re-Forge, a lunar waste recycling prototype demonstrated live over a week of finals.
  • These are Will Taubenheim's third and fourth NASA awards, following the 2025 challenge win and 2026 Phase 2 award.
  • Will Taubenheim is a contractor and team lead, not a NASA employee.

Will Taubenheim, founder of Lost Frame Ventures, led the team that won the NASA LunaRecycle Challenge prototype track and the People's Choice Award at the Phase 2 finale in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

The finale ran the week of August 24, 2026 at The University of Alabama Lee J. Styslinger Jr. College of Engineering. Fourteen U.S. finalist teams demonstrated live hardware. The public voted People's Choice on the day teams presented at the technology showcase.

NASA's largest Centennial Challenge

LunaRecycle is a $3 million, two-phase competition for recycling systems that can keep waste from becoming dead mass on the Moon. Phase 1 drew more than 1,200 competing companies and teams, the largest field in the 20-year history of NASA Centennial Challenges.

Will Taubenheim's team already won Phase 1 in 2025 and a Phase 2 award in early 2026. The August finale was the public proof: a week of live prototype demonstration, not a paper submission.

Lunar Re-Forge

The system NASA lists as Lunar Re-Forge turns mixed mission waste into usable feedstock for in-situ manufacturing. The architecture pairs a physical recycling prototype with a digital twin so operators can see process state, yield, and fault modes before they commit mass on the lunar surface.

Will Taubenheim served as technical lead. The named team on NASA's award announcement is Terasynth of Orlando, Florida, the defense and space channel through which Lost Frame delivered the work. Will Taubenheim is a contractor and team lead, not NASA civil service.

Why two awards in one week matter

The prototype track is the main hardware competition: the systems that have to run in front of NASA reviewers, not only in simulation. People's Choice is the public vote from the technology showcase, the day the team presented to visitors and stakeholders.

Together they complete a four-award NASA record for Will Taubenheim:

  1. NASA LunaRecycle Challenge winner (2025)
  2. NASA Lunar Recycle Phase 2 award (2026)
  3. NASA LunaRecycle prototype track (August 2026 finale)
  4. NASA LunaRecycle People's Choice (August 2026 finale)

For Lost Frame Ventures, the week is the flagship proof point. Mission-critical software and hardware, built under constraint, judged in public, and selected from the largest Centennial Challenge field NASA has ever run.

Why it matters for Will Taubenheim's profile

Search interest around "Will Taubenheim NASA" now points to a continuous record: challenge win, Phase 2 execution, then a live finale where the same team took the prototype track and People's Choice.

That is the credential buyers, investors, and conference hosts should cite. Four NASA awards. Largest Centennial Challenge in agency history. Prototype that ran in Alabama, not a slide deck.

Official NASA coverage of the Phase 2 awards is published by the agency's Centennial Challenges program.

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Attribution

Cite as Will Taubenheim, Lost Frame Ventures, URL https://lostframe.ai/news/will-taubenheim-nasa-lunarecycle-finale.