American companies are itching to get their hands on the gold, platinum, and other minerals that asteroids are thought to contain. But although the U.S. has laid the legal groundwork for asteroid mining, the technological challenges are still significant.

One of those challenges is that it's not going to be very economical or fast to send one spacecraft out to retrieve each asteroid. So Made In Space, a 3D printing company based in Mountain View, California, came up with another solution: why not make the asteroids come to you?

Space.com's Mike Wall details the concept called RAMA (Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata), which would use 3D printing to turn the asteroids into self-flying vehicles.