It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a “safe” gathering point near our planet.
The company, TransAstra, said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to fund a study of its proposed “New Moon” mission to capture and relocate an asteroid approximately the size of a house, with a mass of about 100 metric tons.
“We envision it becoming a base for robotic research and development on materials processing and manufacturing,” said Joel Sercel, chief executive officer of TransAstra. “Long term, instead of building space hardware on the ground and launching propellant up from the Earth, we could harvest it from raw materials in space.”
Lots of targets
Sercel said there are as many as 250 potential target asteroids, with a diameter of up to about 20 meters, that could be reached with reusable, robotic spacecraft over the next decade. He envisions aggregating dozens, and then hundreds, of small asteroids at the “New Moon” processing facility, which could potentially be located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, about 1.5 million km from Earth.
Such asteroids could provide water for use as propellant and minerals for everything from solar panels to radiation shielding. Various asteroids could be targeted for their content, such as C-type asteroids as a source of water or M-types for metals.
All of this may seem a little bit out there, and to some extent it is. That’s the point of the feasibility study, which Sercel said will be completed by May, which will further refine a mission plan and its trajectory and the spacecraft needed to fly it. If fully funded, the mission could rendezvous with an asteroid by as early as 2028 or 2029. TransAstra is working with the University of Central Florida, Purdue, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech to complete its analysis.
Capture bag technology advancing
TransAstra has already performed some preliminary work in space with its “capture bag” technology. This is pretty much what it sounds like, a large bag made from laminates such as Kapton that expands to encompass an asteroid and allows it to be towed to a different location.
Last September, a 1-meter prototype bag built by TransAstra flew to the International Space Station aboard a Cygnus spacecraft. There an astronaut moved it into the Bishop airlock, where the bag was successfully opened and closed in the vacuum of space.
Also last fall, TransAstra won a $2.5 million contract from NASA to scale up the size of its inflatable capture bag system to 10 meters in diameter, the size it says it needs to corral small asteroids. Matched by private funding, the combined funds have allowed TransAstra to be able to accelerate development and testing of its larger capture bag.
Have spacecraft, will travel
The company will partner with another provider for a spacecraft capable of traveling into deep space and making a rendezvous with an asteroid.
“We are studying the entire industrial base for who would provide the spacecraft,” Sercel said. “We think there are many options of spacecraft providers within the United States, and we’re looking at their performance and cost effectiveness from the perspective of determining feasibility. Later on, the customer will make the final selection.”
Bringing back several kilograms of an asteroid—let alone one with a mass of 100 tons—is incredibly ambitious. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned to Earth in 2023 with a total of 121.3 grams of material from the asteroid Bennu. The science mission cost more than $1 billion.
TransAstra is proposing to bring back vastly more material for significantly less. The initial mission, Sercel said, would cost a “few hundred million” dollars. That may sound borderline impossible, but it’s the kind of breakthrough needed if humanity is going to start building a future for itself in the Solar System, with materials from the Solar System beyond Earth.
