NASA's Human Lander Challenge

The 2025 Human Lander Challenge seeks ideas from the university community for advanced cryogenics applications for NASA's Human Landing System (HLS).

The Human Lander Challenge (HuLC) is an initiative supporting NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate’s (ESDMD’s) efforts to explore innovative solutions for a variety of known HLS challenge areas. Through this competition, college students become important partners in NASA’s advancement of HLS technologies, concepts, and approaches. Improvements in these technology areas have the potential to revolutionize NASA’s approach to space exploration, and contributions from the academic community are a valuable part of the journey to discovery. HuLC is open to full-time or part-time undergraduate and graduate students at an accredited U.S.-based community college, college, or university. Minority Serving Institutions are encouraged to apply.

The 2025 Human Lander Challenge asks teams of students and their faculty advisors to design innovative solutions and technology developments addressing in-space cryogenic liquid storage and transfer systems for long duration NASA missions to the Moon. In-space propulsion systems utilizing cryogenic liquids as propellants are necessary to achieve NASA’s exploration missions to the Moon, and later to Mars. In current state of the art (SOA) human scale, in-space propulsion vehicles, cryogenic liquids can be stored for several hours. In order for the planned HLS mission architecture to close, cryogenic liquids must be stored on-orbit on the order of several months.

The 2025 HuLC competition asks student teams to develop innovative, systems-level solutions to understand, mitigate potential problems, and mature advanced cryogenic fluid technologies that can be implemented within 3-5 years. The potential solutions that teams can propose include, but are not limited to, the following categories: