Asteroids contain large quantities of both precious and common metals, and despite the obvious challenges in reaching them, a few startups say these celestial bodies could offer a sustainable alternative to Earth-based mineral extraction, which is plagued by issues like diminishing supply and environmental damage.The race is on to access this wealth of resources. Among the companies working on the problem is California-based TransAstra, which has developed and tested a device called Capture Bag, an inflatable bag that comes in different sizes, intended to catch anything from small rocks to house-sized boulders. The company says the bag could also be used for cleaning up human-made space junk, a problem that is increasingly a source of worry for governments and scientists.“Asteroid mining is a very risky, challenging thing to do,” said Joel Sercel, an aerospace engineer who taught at Caltech, and founder of TransAstra. “To solve the asteroid mining problem, you actually have to solve four other problems that we call detect, capture, move and process.” In other words, an asteroid mining system must be able to detect the space rock to be mined, capture it, successfully move it to a safe location in space and then process it to extract the minerals.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“We have tech in all those areas,” Sercel added. “At last count, we have about 21 patents, and we get a new patent issued about every month.”TransAstra completed a preliminary test of the Capture Bag, without any actual capture, aboard the International Space Station in early October, and through private and NASA funding it is now preparing to create a much larger, more functional version of the device.Sercel knows where to look to find asteroids worth mining, aiming to focus his search on a special …
