TransAstra And The Space Age Gold Rush

"So, just for a little bit of fun..." I said in the middle of my hour-long sit-down with Joel Sercel, PhD, the visionary CEO and founder of space mining company, TransAstra. "Maybe fifty, sixty years down the road, you're the Rockefeller slash Andrew Carnegie of space mining resources--"

"And I'll be younger than I am now due to bio-hacking and age reversal," Sercel said with sunny optimism, sitting comfortably in flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt with Scout, his super friendly dog, at his side.

"How fast can you run a mile?" he asked a bit out of the blue, revealing a more competitive side no doubt necessary in the NewSpace race.

"Way slower than you. I guarantee you," I answered, big confidence not needed nearly as much in space blogging. We both laughed. I quickly moved on before he could suggest a footrace down Desmond Street. "So, we're sitting on the Moon--"

"I'd rather be sitting there..." Sercel leaned back, flashed his green laser pointer and drew a lazy circle around the utopia-like space settlement on the ceiling above us. "...looking down at the Moon."

"People don't understand how easy it is to build mega structures in space once you have thousands of tons of asteroid resources," Sercel said. "So, imagine a machine that you feed asteroid in on one side and the structure of worlds comes out on the other side. ..."

Fascinating Future

And so it went as we sat under the sprawling space mural at The Hive, TransAstra's Los Angeles headquarters. I craned my neck as Sercel and his green laser pointer took me decade by decade through the fascinating future as he sees it, culminating in that space settlement in the corner, a mega structure of parks and habitats and artificial gravity and breathable air made from pieces of asteroid he assured me was entirely possible in our lifetimes.

"Well, at that point, the asteroid mining is all Queen Bees," Sercel said, circling the massive TransAstra-stamped super harvester on the ceiling. "Each one is bringing back thousands of tons of material at a time [from near-Earth asteroids]."

Giant balls of ice from the asteroids will be processed at the TransAstra fuel depots parked between Earth and the Moon. These depots will provide purified water propellant for Worker Bee orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs) and liquid hydrogen for the payload delivery spacecraft needed to support a thriving cislunar economy, he said. Worker Bees can be considered the base model of TransAstra's plug-and-play Apis flight system architecture. They'll be able to level up with technology upgrades to accomplish other missions like prospecting and mining.

A semi-trailer-size Worker Bee 3 OTV by itself will be able to move mega structures in cislunar space. With an Optical Mining module and capture bag upgrade it becomes the mighty Queen Bee. A pickup-truck-size Worker Bee 2 will tug spacecraft as big as any that are around today and can be upgraded to a Honey Bee harvester, precursor to Queen Bee. A motorcycle-size Worker Bee 1 for cube and small satellite deployment can be upgraded to a Mini Bee, Sercel explained as he worked his way through the mural.

Queen Bee could be ready to launch by the very late 2020s or early 2030s. Honey Bee could launch by the mid 2020s. A Mini Bee in-space demonstration of TransAstra's asteroid mining technology could reach orbit by 2024, he said.

TransAstra is also planning a presence on the Moon. The company is collaborating with Blue Origin on the delivery of its extendable Sun Flower power towers that will bring much-needed solar energy down to future mining outposts in the shadows of Moon craters where all the water will surely be, he said.

"We've shown that with inflatable structures, you can launch power stations [onto] the Moon that can deliver up to a megawatt of power down into dark, cold places where the water is trapped on the Moon," he said.

By the time an ageless Sercel and I meet up on his cislunar space station half a century from now, there will be "mega power towers on the Moon, powering massive mining installations on the lunar poles" harvesting water and regolith and shooting all of it off the surface using electromagnetic launch, he said. "The Moon becomes an incredible source of raw materials for building mega structures in cislunar space."

"Reverse Engineering The Future Of Space"

Sercel founded TransAstra in 2017 with the grand goal to spark the resources gold rush that will enable the exponential growth of humanity in outer space. Then, he and his engineers went to work on the fundamental technologies needed to achieve that goal.

His company's Reverse Engineering The Future Of Space approach (pasted prominently on the mural at The Hive) earned it close to $5 million in NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NAIA) seed funding and the support of Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, which helped fund the likes of Airbnb and DoorDash, now multi-billion-dollar publicly traded companies.

TransAstra didn't jump right into designing spacecraft. Rather, the company focused on the things no one else was doing, earning multiple patents along the way.

"TransAstra is a vision driven company. We start with a vision that we want to enable for humanity. And we say, 'What technologies are needed that no one else is working on or that don't exist to make that happen?' Well, it's transportation technologies. It's space resources technologies. It's the ability to find dark moving objects in space," Sercel said.

So, TransAstra tackled telescopes, better propulsion and an innovative way to blast through space rock using rays of sunshine...

Step 3: Mine The Asteroids

If you are like me, who grew up in the 90s--or as my son puts it, "in the 1900s"--asteroid mining is Ben Affleck power drilling to 800 feet through solid metal with a 12-wheeled space rig on a Texas-sized planet killer. But drill rigs landing on asteroids couldn't be further from the TransAstra future we're about to witness if plans pan out.

The near-Earth asteroids TransAstra will target (at least to begin with) are rocky C-types and are very small compared to the rogue M-type monster in the movie, Armegeddon. Instead of landing on them, TransAstra Queen Bees and Honey Bees will apparently swallow their single-family-home-size asteroids whole (mansions for Queen Bee) and then go to work on them using the company's sunlight-powered Optical Mining technology.

TransAstra harvesters will primarily be after water, which is worth big money in outer space. 100 tons of water (Honey Bee's carrying capacity) is worth about $1 billion in space, Sercel told CNBC in a recent status update on space mining. "And we know that because we have a contract to deliver 100 tons of ice in geostationary orbit from a publicly traded company."

TransAstra animations illustrate how Optical Mining might work in space. Once a harvester has an asteroid under control in its inflatable capture bag, large mirrors on either side of the spacecraft adjust to bounce sunlight to secondary reflectors that focus an intense beam of sunlight onto the asteroid's surface, super-heating that section. Volatiles like water are released and stored separate from the rocky bits as Optical Mining slowly breaks the asteroid apart.

During my tour of The Hive, Sercel took me to see the Mini Bee Ground System test bed set up in the back parking lot used to demonstrate Optical Mining. It had been fired up for a test on a simulated asteroid just days before my visit.


A Honey Bee using Optical Mining will be able to extract up to 100 tons of water from each 10-meter asteroid it captures. A Queen Bee will be "capable of extracting up to thousands of tons of water from 50-meter asteroids," according descriptions on TransAstra's website.

There are centuries, maybe even one thousand years worth of resources in the asteroids of the solar system, Sercel said. "One thousand years of exponential growth for humanity. Not too bad."

Step 2: Get To The Asteroids

One of the most ingenious parts of TransAstra's unique harvesters is that they will use the same sunlight to move themselves around as they use to mine asteroids for the very water they use as propellent. The concentrated sunlight is just reflected in the opposite direction onto the recently patented Omnivore solar-thermal thruster and the circle is complete.

TransAstra animations show how the secondary reflectors might simply be rotated from mining mode to thruster mode inside each harvester. The beam of sunlight from its mirrors is then refocused onto what TransAstra calls the "proprietary solar absorber system" of the Omnivore thruster, super heating the water vapor inside under just the right conditions. The gas ejected out of the nozzle of Omnivore would propel the craft through space. A key component of the Apis architecture, TransAstra plans to use Omnivore thrusters on all of its spacecraft.


An Omnivore thruster, true to its name, can consume "nearly any volatile" to use as propellant, according to TransAstra's website, which claims, "Omnivore provides the best possible combination of fast, clean and affordable travel through space".

It does so by acting like a steam engine, which has been developed over centuries, Sercel said.

"And you think, 'How hard can that be?', because all you're doing is boiling water or ethanol or hydrazine or methane or some other fluid. How hard can that be?" he said. "It's effing hard. When you actually look at the physics of what it takes to have a tube that's heated from the outside and you know where along that tube it's gonna boil. That physics? That's hard."

Step 1: Find The Asteroids

There are almost a billion near-Earth asteroids larger than an automobile floating in outer space, but humanity has discovered only about 0.003% of them, Sercel said in his September presentation at the NIAC 2022 Symposium. The vast majority are just too small to see and they move too fast against a background of stars to track with traditional methods.

Enter Sutter Ultra, the space prospector named for Sutter's Mill and the discovery there that triggered the California Gold Rush in the 1800s.

Sutter Ultra spacecraft, each carrying a cluster of more than a hundred low-cost high-performance telescopes--TransAstra and telescope giant Celestron recently announced a partnership, will be carried into orbit by Worker Bees to sweep deep space for small asteroids. Then, using off-the-shelf graphics cards and a proprietary algorithm, TransAstra's patent-pending Optimized Matched Filter Tracking (OMFT) will crunch the data.

Sutter Ultra's 109 telescopes will be strategically positioned in a cross pattern to maximize its field of view as the spacecraft slowly rotates in outer space, as shown in animations illustrating the concept. Sutter telescopes capture the faint light of small objects on frame by frame images. All possibilities of each objects' potential speed and direction of travel are then predicted by OMFT. If an object happens to show up in a different place on the next frame along a predicted path, its speed and direction of travel are recorded and the object is tracked.

The Sutter Telescope System seems to be so good at spotting and following small objects that, once in space, Sutter spacecraft might also be tasked with real-time tracking of space junk, which is a growing problem in Earth's orbit. Mini Bee might then be sent to scoop some of it up and dispose of it, Sercel said. It's a great example of the unexpected opportunities for TransAstra's core technologies that help humanity more immediately while also helping the company reach its larger goals.

"The Sutter was originally designed to prospect asteroids, but you need it for space domain awareness... Sutter is perfect for that," he said. "Frankly, we didn't envision that when we started working on Sutter."

TransAstra already operates a ground-based version of the Sutter system at both Sierra Remote Observatory near Yosemite, CA and Winer Observatory in Tucson, AZ. A Sutter Demo spacecraft with a cluster of four test telescopes could reach orbit by 2024, right around the time Mini Bee launches for the first time, he said.

Once Sutter Ultra reaches outer space, it should find hundreds of thousands of new near-Earth asteroids and with them thousands of low-hanging mining candidates every year, Sercel said. "We expect Sutter Ultra to be able to find trillions of dollars worth of space resources material."

Steps Ahead

"How many people actually have the tech to mine an asteroid," Sercel said when asked about any head start TransAstra might have over newcomers to asteroid mining. "Well, TransAstra has patents in that area, but moreover, we have know-how and capability in that area from years of experimentation and test. And that's really what it's all about."

It's 100 times harder to have a new insight into the nature of the universe than it is to learn it in school. And engineers at TransAstra are pushing boundaries in multiple areas at a time. Sutter Ultra and Omnivore are prime examples, he said.

"Here we have something in one discipline, rocket propellant and fluid mechanics, and another discipline, which is electro-optics and information processing. You say, 'Which is harder?' I don't know," he said. "But here's what I do know is that we have some really bright people in this company, as bright as any other aerospace company in the world, and it's right at our limit to understand both."

Into The Expanse

"Is it inevitable?" I asked as our interview wound down.

I knew Sercel had seen the show and that he thinks deeply about the effects of space on the human race. I also just wanted to hear a really smart futurist talk about some of the predictions in The Expanse, one of my favorite streaming Sci-fi series'.

But, what exactly did I mean by "it"? Or "inevitable"? Or "Is"? Fortunately, as I fumbled to clarify, Sercel picked up the ball and ran. We were low on time.

If we do the right things, humans can spread out. Billions of people will live on all kinds of bodies throughout the solar system and our species will grow for hundreds of years, even evolving in different ways like in The Expanse, he said.

"But it's not inevitable. It's not inevitable that human beings survive. Every generation is challenged in new ways. And every generation has to rise up to the challenge and do the right thing... But I think it can happen and I think it's likely to happen," he said

One prediction in The Expanse Sercel did take issue with, perhaps not surprisingly, is the portrayal of the Belter asteroid belt colonists as being oppressed by the Inners of Earth and Mars.

"I think that's highly, highly unlikely," he said.

It's costly to put people on a new frontier, so asteroid colonists will be the most capable humanity has to offer. Once settled, they will have at their fingertips virtually unlimited energy from the Sun and virtually unlimited material from asteroids, he said. "You take the smartest, hardest working, most ambitious people in the solar system, give them the most energy and the most material, they're going to be the wealthiest and most successful people in the solar system."

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