Matt Gialich

That's how we attach ourselves to the asteroids.

There's an ESA mission that did a really complicated way to try to grapple onto an asteroid with these hooks, and it was pretty cool, and they spent a lot of money, I think about a billion dollars trying to figure it out, and it kind of worked.

I mean, they were able to do it, but it was a little bit fraught with air.

I don't think as a startup I have any other way to land on an asteroid other than to magnetically attach to it.

Landing on a piece of dirt or a rubble pile in space that is really small like this is next to impossible, or I'm just not smart enough to figure it out for the capital we have.

So we land on it.

How close do you have to get to it for the magnets to land?

Pretty close.

I mean, we have to touch the surface.

We've got to touch it.

So we'll essentially crash into it at about one meter a second.

That's the upper limit of velocity we'll have when we intercept the asteroid.

So if you think about it, that's not slow, especially when you think about space hardware and how slow we usually go on space stuff.

But it's not fast.

It's a pretty low impact that we hit the asteroid with to attach to it.

That's what we build the system for.

And then what we do is we use a laser system.

So we use a laser system to essentially start drilling into the asteroid.

We remove the material.

So we're removing iron, nickel, and platinum group metals.