The Spanish engineer who won a $1 million NASA prize but won't collect it: "I prefer the recognition."

From her living room and with no tools other than a smoking laptop, María Jesús Puerta has achieved the impossible: single-handedly beating teams of researchers, universities, and companies from 80 countries in NASA's Lunar Recycling Challenge . She has done it while balancing her work, family life, and cancer. "Juggling" everything and working through the night in cafes and libraries. When it came time to work on the project, there was only one thing burning inside her. "My sole purpose was to try to prove to my children and myself that, even though I'm coming from an illness, from cancer in the middle of treatment, I could achieve the goal of presenting the project and getting it accepted. That was my triumph. Everything else has been a dream," she explains to ABC.

For any aspiring scientist, glory would be conquering NASA. But for her, the true feat was teaching her children that fear and pain can be transformed into hope. This 56-year-old mining engineer knows well what it means to face great challenges, both in her personal and professional life.

Puerta is currently in the process of overcoming the breast cancer she was diagnosed with seven years ago. After seeing specialists to begin treatment, she realized the importance of early detection to "cope with this disease well." It was then that she decided to leverage her knowledge and personal experience to develop an AI-powered technology that would "help patients" get a second opinion about breast cancer.

"Hope" was the name chosen for that project. The same name that her new project has now inherited: a digital twin with a solution for recycling waste on the Moon. Specifically, it manages to reduce 4,500 kilos of waste to just 50. The rest is used to generate useful materials for future space missions. "My husband told me about the NASA initiative, and I decided to submit a project, even though I knew the challenge it posed. At the time, I had two major limitations: personal, due to the treatment of my illness, and professional, due to my workload," she recalls.

The digital twin he developed simulates how a system capable of recycling waste—such as dust, plastics, and other materials—would work on the Moon, applying the same principle as on Earth: harnessing resources following the circular economy model. Puerta, for example, managed to create lunar concrete. The key to success, in his words, lies in being able to work with real data. "I connected to NASA and downloaded it. I'm a bit of a geek, and I generated a fairly realistic simulation, as if I were working from within. The US agency leads the international Artemis program to return to the Moon and is quite concerned about the issue of waste."

Despite achieving the unimaginable and taking the win, the engineer was left without the million dollars NASA promised because she isn't American. "The award had some fine print that no one told me about. In the announcement, they made it clear that you could get the money if you won the first phase of the challenge, but I found out I was the only one—out of six winners—who wouldn't be receiving the money when they told me I was the winner." Puerta tried to negotiate with NASA and explain her situation. "I told them I'm 56 years old, that I'm completely alone, and that I'm carrying a very large backpack on my shoulders," she explains, but the response was a resounding no: "Rules are rules." Even so, the Tarragona native holds no grudge against NASA. "I don't feel like they underestimated me. It would have been very easy for them to remove me from the winners' photo, but they didn't. "They've had the gesture of valuing my project, congratulating me, and giving me the same recognition as everyone else, even though I'm from outside their country," he says.

For her, that gesture carries more weight than any figure. "I feel that NASA's recognition of my project is more important than money, even if it's a million dollars," she says. Puerta believes the decision to exclude her from the prize money is a strategic decision. She maintains that the competition actually has two types of winners. On the one hand, an international one—hers in this edition—and on the other, the five teams from the United States. As she later found out, these groups have been working and participating in these types of competitions for years, and NASA often grants them subsidies that, in practice, keep the money within the country and reinforce the image that the agency invests only in American companies and projects.

Despite her achievement, no official Spanish institution has contacted her. Neither the Ministry of Science nor the Spanish Space Agency. "I suppose there must be many Spaniards who have won NASA competitions so they don't notice me, and my profile is, to say the least, odd," she laments, while mentioning that "only the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, where I studied, has written to congratulate me."

Even so, with no money and hardly any support, Puerta intends to continue the challenge and enter the second phase. "I've already shown my children that I can do it, now I want to show the rest my best version. Beyond the technical aspects, my goal is to demonstrate that a single woman, without resources, from Spain, can lead first-class space innovation. If I get support, I want Esperanza to also serve as an inspiration and driving force to create an ecosystem of disruptive science from the local level, with global impact."