There are roughly 250 small, near-Earth asteroids teeming with precious resources that are ripe for extraction. Mining asteroids for water and metals has the potential to be extremely lucrative, but companies have so far struggled to come up with the means to extract resources from the flying space rocks.

It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a "safe" gathering point near our planet.