NASA funds project to turn asteroids into autonomous spaceships

NASA, along with a 3D printing company, is going all innovative by planning to turn asteroids into huge, autonomous spaceships that will be able to fly into space.

Space agency NASA has recently announced that it would fund a 3D printing company, 'Made In Space', in order to look at ways for recycling asteroids into large, self-flying spaceships that will be able to fly to outposts in space by the year 2030.

The printing company’s project called Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata (RAMA) will be able to colonize space one day by helping to make off-Earth manufacturing efficient and economically viable, reported Space.com

The funding was provided via NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program that will give $100,000 for feasibility studies. Made In Space co-founder and chief technology officer, Jason Dunn said, “Today, we have the ability to bring resources from Earth.”

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He added, “But when we get to a tipping point where we need the resources in space, then the question becomes, ‘Where do they come from and how do we get them, and how do we deliver them to the location that we need?’ This is a way to do it.”

Being a long-term project, the company is planning to send an advanced robotic ‘Seed Craft’ out to rendezvous with a succession of near-Earth asteroid in space. The craft would harvest materials from the space rocks and then use this feedstock for constructing propulsions, energy-storage, navigation and some other systems onsite with the help of 3D printing and other technologies, reported NDTV.

Hence being transformed into autonomous spacecraft, the asteroid would be programmed to fly to a mining station in Earth-moon space, or anywhere else. Moreover, this approach would be way more proficient instead of launching a new probe to every single space rock aimed at resource exploitation.

However, since RAMA is in very early stages for now and Dunn expects that this project might take 20 years with the first Seed Craft getting off ground in late 2030s. Apart from space, the project might also have applications on Earth as well, as Dunn says similar machines could perform numerous tasks here.

“You could build infrastructure in remote locations somewhat autonomously, and convert resources into useful devices and mechanical machines. This actually could solve some pretty big problems on Earth, from housing to construction of things that make people's lives better.”