NASA Lunar Grounding Challenge targets spacesuit static

Walking on the moon builds up static electricity on a spacesuit, and NASA wants help fixing that before it becomes a danger to crews.

The agency opened the Lunar Grounding Challenge on Oct. 5, 2026, offering up to $150,000 in prizes for innovative ways to neutralize a suited astronaut before they re-enter a lander. Submissions close Jan. 15, 2027.

The problem: as an astronaut moves across the lunar South Pole, friction from walking and plasma from the environment generate electric charge on the suit. The effect gets much worse in shadows and permanently shadowed regions, where there is no sunlight to release electrons and little ion flow to balance them out. In those dark zones, the suit can build up a substantial negative potential, NASA says.

The risk comes when the astronaut returns to the spacecraft. The lunar surface has no natural way to bleed off that charge, so the astronaut can become "a walking, high voltage capacitor," according to NASA's challenge description.

In sunlight, the lander itself holds a slightly positive potential. When a highly negatively charged astronaut gets close, the voltage difference can trigger an electrostatic discharge, essentially a spark, during physical contact. That rapid discharge could degrade vital suit layers, damage sensitive suit electronics, threaten the oxygen-rich environment inside the suit, and deliver dangerous shocks to the crew.

NASA is looking for concepts that can safely and quickly bring a suited astronaut back to electrical equilibrium before they directly touch the lander. The agency wants designs that handle the extreme charge differential during lunar surface spacewalks, known as extravehicular activities, in the South Pole region.

It's a real engineering problem with a clear deadline. NASA is not asking for a finished system, but for ideas that could become one. The challenge page, hosted on Crowdplat, lays out the full requirements.

This is one of those problems that sounds like a physics textbook example, but it has life-or-death stakes. A spark inside a suit near an oxygen-rich environment is not something you want to test by accident. NASA is smart to ask for outside thinking.

If you have an idea for grounding a spacesuit, the window is open until January. The prize is not huge by space-program standards, but the challenge is real, and the solution could end up on a future Artemis mission.

For now, the agency is clear about the status: it's a challenge, not a contract. But the first step to solving a problem is admitting it exists, and NASA just did, in public, with a cash prize attached.

• electrostatic discharge
• Lunar Grounding Challenge
• moon
• NASA
• South Pole
• spacesuit