Price explained that the company’s engineers had developed technology that would allow a spacecraft about the size of a mail truck to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, then enter a hummingbird-like mode and “kiss” its surface. The craft’s “beak” would be an unfolding eleven-foot-long mechanism with a cannister on its end, which would kick up material with a little blast of nitrogen. The spacecraft would stow this bounty in a protective capsule, fly back home, and then parachute it to Earth.