Nudging Asteroids to Build Worlds and Defend Planets
From lunar iron mines and Martian resources to space habitats and planetary defense: exploring how small orbital nudges could put nearby asteroids to work.
See LASSO: Read This Summary First — An Illustrated Technical Guide: An eight-page illustrated overview of the orbital mechanics, lunar impact physics, asteroid candidates, propulsion, and safety considerations.
Our first iron fell from the sky
Long before humans learned to smelt iron ore, they were making tools from meteorites. Tutankhamun was buried with a meteoritic-iron dagger. Inuit communities in Greenland made tools from the Cape York meteorite.
Nature has been delivering metal from space for billions of years.
Future settlements on the Moon and Mars will need enormous quantities of iron, water, and other materials. Launching everything from Earth would be extraordinarily expensive.
Fortunately, the solar system is full of the stuff. Most of it is simply in the wrong places.
What if, instead of sending spacecraft out to mine asteroids and haul the materials back, we could use relatively small amounts of propulsion to redirect entire asteroids toward places where their resources are needed?
Orbital mechanics rewards patience. A small change in velocity, applied decades in advance, can dramatically change where an asteroid ends up.
And here’s another interesting possibility: some asteroids on favorable orbits could reach the Moon at surprisingly low impact speeds, allowing much of their metal to survive the collision, yet fast enough to fragment the metal asteroids into useful, recoverable pieces.
That opens some fascinating possibilities, from lunar iron mines and Martian construction materials to space habitats and even planetary defense.
The Moon: Don’t land it. Drop it.
The original LASSO proposal, Lunar Asteroid Salvage by Slower-impact Operation, explores an unconventional way to supply metal to future lunar settlements.
The idea takes advantage of two characteristics of certain near-Earth asteroids: they may require relatively small velocity changes to redirect toward the Moon, and their approach trajectories may allow unusually low impact speeds.
That’s an appealing combination: Less propulsion to deliver the material, and just enough destruction when it arrives.
The Moon contains plenty of iron, but most of it is chemically bound in minerals. Extracting it takes energy and industrial equipment.
Asteroids are different. Some are rich in iron-nickel metal, already chemically reduced billions of years ago. Even ordinary chondritic bodies contain metallic grains.
Suppose you’ve found a promising near-Earth asteroid full of metal. You could mine it, load the material onto spacecraft, fly everything to the Moon, and spend precious fuel making a soft landing.
Or you could skip a few steps.
Don’t land it. Drop it.
Find an asteroid on a favorable orbit. Give it a small push decades in advance. Guide it toward a selected lunar site and let the impact do the crushing.
The crater becomes the mine.
Here’s the surprising part: an asteroid doesn’t necessarily have to strike the Moon at the enormous speeds we normally associate with asteroid impacts. The nearby co-orbital asteroids arrive more slowly because of orbital mechanics.
For the favorable orbital geometry examined in LASSO, the calculated minimum impact speed is about 2.42 km/s, just above the Moon’s escape velocity of 2.38 km/s.
That’s roughly three times the speed of a rifle bullet. Hardly a gentle landing!
But it’s slow enough to make an important difference, and often fast enough to start beneficially shattering iron asteroids for mining.
Previous lunar-impact simulations have found that at speeds of 3–7 km/s, much of an asteroid’s material can survive without melting, and is pre-shattered for easier collection. Depending on the impact angle, a substantial fraction may also remain within the crater.
Instead of vaporizing the cargo, a relatively low-speed impact could break much of it into solid fragments, leaving a deposit of useful metal fragments ready for recovery.
The original LASSO study (link at end) screened 14,085 known near-Earth asteroids and identified 1,124 with potentially favorable, relatively low-speed lunar arrival trajectories. Fourteen were examined in greater detail, and all fourteen passed the orbital verification checks.
That’s a surprisingly large pool of possibilities. But which contain useful metal, how much propulsion would they need, and how much material could actually be recovered? Those are the next challenges.
Safety is another essential consideration. LASSO proposes separate terminal guidance, with a nominal trajectory that misses Earth and the Moon unless the final lunar impact is deliberately authorized. Any actual mission would require independent safety validation.
Still, it’s an appealing reversal: instead of mining an asteroid and shipping the metal, wobble the asteroid’s orbit and let its collision with the Moon break it into usable pieces.
Planetary defense: Asteroid billiards
In 2022, NASA’s DART spacecraft struck the asteroid Dimorphos and shortened its orbital period by about 33 minutes.
The collision demonstrated that a spacecraft can deliberately change an asteroid’s motion.
But what if the impactor were another asteroid?
Suppose astronomers discover a dangerous asteroid decades before a possible Earth impact. Somewhere nearby in orbital space, a smaller asteroid happens to be traveling on a trajectory that could be adjusted to intercept it.
A spacecraft gradually nudges the smaller body over several years.
Eventually, the two asteroids collide, transferring momentum and potentially changing the dangerous asteroid’s trajectory enough to miss Earth.
The spacecraft supplies the steering. The asteroid supplies the mass.
No nuclear bomb is inherently required. The energy comes primarily from the asteroids’ relative motion.
There’s something wonderfully counterintuitive about protecting Earth from an asteroid by deliberately arranging another asteroid impact.
The idea has substantial prior art, including proposals by Eismont, Inoue, the BILLIARDS team, and Li and colleagues. The supplementary LASSO disclosure places natural kinetic impactors within a broader collection of asteroid-redirection techniques.
Philip Lubin and colleagues at UC Santa Barbara are exploring complementary planetary-defense approaches, including directed energy and asteroid fragmentation.
Here’s a question worth testing:
Could AI-assisted searches of existing asteroid catalogs find pairs of asteroids where a modest early nudge could set up a useful collision?
It’s a problem of timing, orbital geometry, propulsion, and momentum transfer. And we’d have to make sure the collision actually reduces the danger, rather than scattering fragments onto new Earth-crossing trajectories.
Maybe useful asteroid pairs are rare. Maybe there are surprisingly good candidates.
Either answer would be interesting, and the techniques could potentially be tested first on nonhazardous objects.
Mars: Meteorites on demand?
Mars already has a meteorite delivery service.
Unfortunately, its asteroid delivery system doesn’t take orders yet.
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In January 2023, NASA’s Curiosity rover photographed a metallic rock about a foot across, nicknamed Cacao. It was an iron-nickel meteorite, one of several discovered on the Martian surface.
Nature has already shown that metallic material can survive the trip.
Future Mars settlements could deliberately arrange similar deliveries.
Start with a metal-bearing asteroid on a favorable trajectory. Give it a small orbital correction toward Mars. Depending on its size, divide it into smaller fragments before arrival.
Mars’s atmosphere provides some braking. The resulting metal could land across a designated recovery area, where robotic equipment might collect it.
Instead of shipping every kilogram of construction metal from Earth, Mars could receive some as meteorites.
Mars has a rather thin atmosphere. Large iron fragments retain considerable speed; smaller ones slow more easily but can lose material through ablation. Partial propulsive braking might help.
And Mars needs more than iron.
Some asteroids contain hydrated minerals and other volatiles. Water-rich bodies could potentially be delivered for processing or parked in accessible Martian orbits.
Water would support agriculture, oxygen production, industry, and rocket propellant. It might make sense to capture a water-rich asteroid rather than smash it into the ground.
So here’s a fun project for planetary scientists and orbital dynamicists:
Which near-Earth and Mars-crossing asteroids could be redirected relatively easily to supply future Martian settlements with metal- or water-bearing materials?
Find the candidate asteroids already orbiting nearby. Calculate the nudges required. Examine the composition. Compare atmospheric delivery with orbital capture.
An asteroid delivery service for Mars sounds like science fiction. Finding out whether it makes engineering sense would be even more fun.
From asteroids to space habitats
Some asteroids might be worth more if they never hit anything.
Park a water-rich one in an accessible orbit, and you’ve potentially got a reservoir for future spacecraft.
Bring a metal-rich asteroid into the same neighborhood, and now you’ve got structural materials too.
Together, they could supply a future shipyard, fuel depot, or space habitat.
The idea builds on a long history of space-settlement research, including Dandridge Cole, Gerard K. O’Neill, and NASA’s asteroid-retrieval studies.
The LASSO supplement linked below explores moving, capturing, splitting, and combining natural bodies as parts of the same general toolkit.
Some might become resource depots. Others could supply radiation shielding, construction materials, or even parts of a spacecraft’s structure.
More speculative applications include using impacts for excavation, delivering volatiles, or modifying planetary environments.
The basic thought is appealing: Instead of building everything on Earth and launching it piece by piece, bring the building materials together in space.
Why publish these ideas openly on Zenodo?
The original LASSO analysis was published on Zenodo in August 2026. A supplementary defensive disclosure followed on November 3, expanding the work into 56 documented technical ideas and variations.
The documents and ideas are freely accessible under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
They are also intended as defensive prior art: Publishing sufficiently detailed technical ideas can help prevent later patent claims on the same subject matter.
The goal of these publications is to keep these ideas in an open technical commons, where anyone can investigate, develop, and build on them, rather than lock them behind patent walls.
AI is another reason this is timely, as AI is making cross-disciplinary exploration easier. Over the next decade, increasingly capable systems will generate thousands of engineering possibilities simply by connecting fields that previously operated separately. Some will be familiar. Others will be impractical. A few may be worth developing.
Ideas are becoming easier to generate. Testing them will remain the hard part.
LASSO is an independent, AI-assisted exploration of these intersections. The original lunar proposal includes quantitative analysis; the broader disclosure records additional possibilities for specialists to examine.
The technical publications are available for anyone interested in taking the ideas further.
Questions worth answering
Somewhere in today’s asteroid catalogs may be a body that could supply a lunar iron mine.
Another might help deflect a dangerous object away from Earth.
And another might deliver useful materials to Mars.
Which ones, and how?
That’s a fascinating challenge for orbital dynamicists, planetary scientists, propulsion engineers, and the next generation of space explorers.
The ideas are on the public record. The next step is to find out which ones work.
Our ancestors’ first iron fell from the sky by accident.
Perhaps the next thousand tonnes will be delivered on demand, to an address of our choosing.
Open technical publications
1. LASSO: Read This Summary First — An Illustrated Technical Guide
Start here. An eight-page illustrated overview of the orbital mechanics, lunar impact physics, asteroid candidates, propulsion, and safety considerations.
2. LASSO: Lunar Asteroid Salvage by Slower-impact Operation
The full technical preprint, including calculations, asteroid-catalog screening, impact-survival analysis, and supporting figures. This permanent DOI links to the publication series.
3. LASSO — Supplementary Defensive Disclosure
Published November 3, 2026. Expands the original work into 56 enumerated technical disclosures covering asteroid redirection, planetary defense, Mars resource delivery, orbital infrastructure, and planetary engineering.
About the research and illustrations
LASSO was developed through human-led, AI-assisted research using structured methods for iterative development, parallel investigation, evidence evaluation, and critical review. Two of these AI-prompt structured research methods are published openly on Zenodo:
- Iterative AI Production (IAP) — An easy-to-use AI prompt for a human-in-the-loop research protocol that develops and critically tests ideas through iterative AI collaboration.
- Fan-Out Harvest (FOH) — An easy-to-use AI prompt protocol for parallel AI-assisted research, standardized evidence collection, and synthesis of independent findings.
The article’s conceptual illustrations were generated using ChatGPT and depict proposed future applications, not actual missions.
The original lunar LASSO analysis is preliminary; the broader applications are exploratory. Mission feasibility, safety, and existing patent rights require independent assessment. CC BY 4.0 licenses published material, not patent rights.
Loren C. Rauch, MD, MPH · Independent researcher
ORCID: 0009–0009–4778–6673
