So then, the space company said, "let's grab a small asteroid..."

... and bring it back to a "safe" spot near Earth. 

Really. 

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.”

When they say, "approximately the size of a house," that isn't a very well-defined number. Do they mean 500 square feet, which at 22 ft 3in on a side might be better described as the size of an apartment in a small city, or 1500 sq. ft.? That's a moderately-sized suburban house.  That dramatically affects what they plan to do with that small asteroid. Like the first small paragraph quoted says, TransAstra envisions a system that flies out to the desired asteroid, capturing it in a large bag, and slowly bringing it to some place like the L2 (Lagrange 2) point of the Moon/Earth system - about 900,000 miles from Earth, and also the home of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

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 is the domain of a study underway now which will be completed by May, and should further refine a mission plan with 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. 

This transfer bag has been tested in the International Space Station, flown up to the station on the Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo drone last fall, then taken into an airlock where the bag was opened and closed while in the vacuum. 

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.

The next major step for TransAstra is they need to find a spacecraft maker to contract for a spacecraft capable of traveling into deep space and making a rendezvous with an asteroid. 

An artist's concept of the New Moon facility with aggregated small asteroids. Credit: TransAstra

With the exception of noting the Earth and moon in the upper left hand corner of the artwork, those are about the only things that look familiar to me. I'll SWAG the big things in what appears to be a bag on the left edge of the image are captured asteroids or other raw materials and just say I have no idea what anything else is supposed to be or what they're supposed to do. 

Let me remind everyone of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu that returned samples of the asteroid in September of 2023. That mission returned 121.3 grams from the asteroid Bennu and cost more than $1 billion but it's quite different than this concept and I don't think it's fair to divide the billion dollar cost by 121.3 grams, to get $8.2 million per gram. That would include costs that didn't contribute to getting those grams of Bennu down to Earth.

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.