California-Based Company Develops Asteroid To Spaceship ‘RAMA’ Project That Prods Off-Earth Mining

Asteroids to spaceships are seen flying some decades from now to help open the last frontier for humanity. This is what Made In Space aims at, a company from California that has been given NASA funding to perform research on how asteroids are turned into a large, autonomous aircraft.

The asteroids to spaceship project called RAMA, or Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata, is one of the company's long-term plan to contribute to space colonization by making off-Earth manufacturing become economically feasible and efficient. Chief technology officer and co-founder Jason Dunn announces the company's ability to deliver resources from Earth by sending out the advanced robotic "Seed Craft" to assemble in space with the series of near-Earth asteroids.

According to Dunn, the Seed Craft will collect the material from the space rocks and use the feedstock to build navigation, propulsion, energy storage as well as other key instruments on site using 3D printing and other technologies. After being made into an autonomous spacecraft, the asteroids can, therefore, be programmed to fly to the mining post in Earth-moon space or anywhere needed. Made In Space stated that this would be more efficient instead of launching a capture probe to each single space rock being aimed at for resource exploitation, Blastr reported.

The transformed asteroids would not look like the usual image of a spacecraft, with its complex electronic circuitry and rocket engines. Instead, the company would provide everything mechanical and simple. For instance, the computer would be analog, almost similar to Antikythera mechanism that outlines the movement of heavenly bodies. According to Dunn the propulsion system may be the same with a catapult that sets boulders off to the asteroid under supervision, which in turn pushes the space rock in an opposite direction.

Asteroids to spaceship project RAMA is still in the early stages of development, and 20 years or more of continued effort may be needed to develop such technology, based on the company's estimate. This means that the first Seed Craft may be launched in the late 2030s, according to Sky News.