Catching asteroids in a bag could be the new gold panning – Jalopnik

When intrepid entrepreneurs discover trillions of dollars’ worth of ore hurtling through space, they see an opportunity. There’s only one problem. How do you bring these expensive stones to Earth to sell them? TransAstra, a Los Angeles startup, is working on capturing asteroids in an inflatable bag. Yes, picking up the rocks. The company’s Capture Bag was tested on the International Space Station last month. Besides Klondike dreams in the stars, the bag would have other practical uses, such as collecting space debris.

TransAstra indicates that it is developing Capture Bags in six sizes. According to CNNsizes range from micro to super jumbo. The next smallest size was successfully tested in an ISS airlock. The garden-wide device was successfully inflated and then closed in a microgravity vacuum. The startup has much bigger ambitions and plans to capture a 10,000-ton asteroid with its largest bag. TransAstra already has a dozen telescopes on the ground that search for asteroids suitable for mining. The telescopes are named Sutter after Sutter’s Mill, a less-than-subtle reference to the California Gold Rush and its origins. Company founder Joel Sercel said:

‘They drift very slowly past the Earth, at a distance of only a few billion kilometers. We already know where hundreds of these objects are, and we plan to get to the first one in 2028 – which, we think, will spark a real industrial revolution in space.”

Space debris is becoming an increasingly relevant issue as spaceflight becomes more common. The return of China’s Shenzhou-20 was delayed when orbital debris hit the craft while it was docked at the Tiangong space station. Engineers believed it was unsafe for the crew to return to the damaged capsule after discovering small cracks in a window. As a result, the Shenzhou-20 crew returned to Earth in the Shenzhou-21 return capsule, the planned mission to replace them.