NASA's Plot To Capture An Asteroid And Save Humanity Almost Failed.

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Dante Lauretta sat in the backseat of a helicopter hovering high above a remote patch of Utah desert, waiting for a small, twinkling speck in the sky to plunge toward Earth.

If you didn't know better, you might think what was beginning to burn through the skies above the American southwest in the early hours of September 24, 2023, was a shooting star. But it wasn't a shooting star. It was a dishwasher-size capsule filled with bits of ancient asteroid —priceless matter from the dawn of the solar system . In other words, it was a treasure chest moving at 27,000 miles per hour and sizzling at a temperature half that of the sun's surface.

What the capsule had to do now, completely autonomously, was simple: stay in one piece as it reentered the atmosphere, open its parachutes, and softly touch down on an Air Force bombing range without detonating any unexploded ordnance nearby.

In 2004, Lauretta was working as an assistant professor at the Lunar and Planetary Lab in Tucson, Arizona. One crisp day in February, representatives from Lockheed Martin approached his advisor, Michael Drake, who was then the Lab's director, and asked, rather matter-of-factly, whether he wanted to steal parts of an asteroid and bring it back to Earth.

The idea appealed to Drake, a straight-talking planetary scientist who had long endeavored to find out how worlds like Earth took shape . Drake asked the then 33-year-old Lauretta, who had joined the lab three years earlier, to be his deputy. It was an easy decision, Lauretta recalls: "People wanted to be part of the adventure."