Deep beneath Mars' red clay surface lie ancient oceans now frozen into ice sheets. Earth's moon has hidden water deposits, too—pockets embedded deep inside its rocks.

It's the kind of liquid treasure scientists at NASA hope to one day mine using specialized drilling tools on the moon or Mars.

As NASA looks for new technology to use in space, the agency is mining a different treasure to help develop those tools: the ingenuity of student engineers.

To that end, 10 student teams from universities around the country—including a team from Virginia Tech—gathered Friday at the Hampton Road Convention Center to share prototypes of remote-controlled drilling machines, during the "Moon to Mars Ice and Prospecting Challenge." The event was a three-day competition that began Thursday and ended Saturday.

The students' prototypes attempted to extract and harvest the most water from ice buried within simulated lunar and Martian landscapes—dirt, clay, sand—packed inside giant blue tubs. It's a technology NASA needs. Rather than sending tons of water into space with the astronauts, it's easier and saves millions to extract the water there.

"The most interesting thing about this is it has to be completely hands off.

Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, announced plans on Monday for its next flight and the news and entertainment website TMZ said it may include a celebrity astronaut—William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on "Star Trek."

TMZ reported that the 90-year-old Shatner would be on the October 12 voyage, making him the oldest person ever to go to space.

Blue Origin revealed the names of two members of the four-person crew but did not confirm that Shatner would be on the flight.

It said Chris Boshuizen, a former NASA engineer and co-founder of Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, a co-founder of clinical research platform Medidata Solutions, would be on the rocket and the names of the two other astronauts will be revealed "in the coming days.