Meet the ‘blue collar’ robot

It takes a lot of fuel to break free from Earth's gravity and navigate outer space. A staggering 90 percent of a rocket's initial mass is made up of propellant. What if we could trim that fat, launch spaceships with minimal resources, and collect the rest of what we need along the way? Such "massless exploration" is very likely our future in space. Imagine we wanted to rendezvous with a distant asteroid and bring back samples from its surface. "Today, that mission would have to be launched with enough propellant for the entire round trip," Kyle Doyle, program manager of Cornell's Cislunar Explorers, told Digital Trends.