That's the thing with hypotheses like this, they get promoted in the media and by scientist personalities like Bill Nye and Brian Cox despite a lack of scientific basis and distort the public's understanding on science's position on the origin of life. That's why it annoys me, not whether they get tested by these observations.
My comment was more about whether asteroids could have been formed from planetary collisions. I think that's possible, and probable. So kind of going back to the 'big bang', stuff cooling, condensing, agglomerating and after playing cosmic pinball for long enough, the biggest chunks forming stars and planets.
But being an SF fan, I also kind of like the idea of Panspermia, I'm not convinced it's true. As you say, we can create life without the need for external influences, but I just think we have a hard time grasping the idea that we can evolve all of it from a simple chemical soup.. Even though that's possible. Maybe there were some 'nudges', but there's no evidence as yet. Maybe projects like this will find those 'Aha!' moments. Or 'This is weird' and 'it's moving'. But also unlikely.
Then maybe we'll come closer to solving the Fermi Paradox. If we can evolve and exist spontaneously, why hasn't anyone/thing else? Personally I think that's again a problem of scale and timescales. Being a comms person, look at the very brief time we've gone from radio broadcasts to more directional broadcasts or fibre. That's a very brief window to detect anything else, if they've followed the same evolutionary path. So maybe we'll just have to wait for interstellar explorers to find ancient ruins, and zenoarchaelogists to decide they were all religious buildings.
It's still fun for me to follow along with the research.