NASA has awarded a crazy project that will transform near Earth asteroids into robot spaceships run by analog computers to a company that describes itself as "the world's first space manufacturing company."

Founded in 2010, Made In Space, Inc. (MIS) was contracted by NASA to design, build and operate the 3D Printing In Zero-G Experiment (3D Print) on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2014. 3D Print became the first machine to manufacture off-Earth.

Like Us on Facebook

The company's newest job for NASA is light years away from 3D Print, however.  MIS is being tasked by NASA to study "the concept feasibility of using the age-old technique of analog computers and mechanisms to convert entire asteroids into enormous autonomous mechanical spacecraft."

This fantastic undertaking is called Project RAMA for Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata.

It's been designed to exploit advancing trends of additive manufacturing or AM (which MIS is good at) and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) to enable asteroid rendezvous missions where a set of technically simple robotic processes convert asteroid elements into very basic versions of spacecraft subsystems such as guidance, navigation and control (GNC), propulsion and avionics.

Once outfitted, the asteroid will become a programmed mechanical automata carrying out specific mission objectives such as relocation to an Earth-Moon libration point for human rendezvous.

NASA said this technique will create an affordable and scalable way for it to achieve future roadmap items for both the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate and the Science Mission Directorate such as Asteroid Redirect Mission, New Frontiers Comet Surface Sample Return and other Near Earth Object (NEO) applications.  

NASA estimates that an order of magnitude increase in NEO targets can be explored for the same mission cost with the RAMA approach compared to the Asteroid Redirect Mission architecture by removing the need to launch all spacecraft subsystems and instead converting the asteroid into spacecraft in-situ.

Project RAMA will create a space mission architecture capable of achieving NASA's goals within a 20 to 30 year time frame.

MIS co-founder Jason Dunn said the company will build robotic "Seed Craft" to rendezvous with near-Earth asteroids. These automata will harvest material from asteroids.

It will also use asteroid minerals to build the GNC, power systems and other essential equipment in-situ with the 3D printing and other technologies. Asteroid automata can be programmed to fly to any destination in near Earth space such as an asteroid mining operation.

Because they will be built from in-situ materials, the asteroid automata will be mechanical and quite primitive. Their computers will likely be analog machines with gears and springs.

TagsNASA, asteroids, Made In Space, Inc., Project RAMA, Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata