NASA and DARPA are starting to get serious about it. I’ll probably try to join the consortium, for some business plans I have.
3 thoughts on “Satellite Servicing”
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NASA and DARPA are starting to get serious about it. I’ll probably try to join the consortium, for some business plans I have.
Comments are closed.
Quite a good robotic set-up at Goddard Space Flight Center as well. I see it almost every day and am very impressed. They are doing great things and I may even be joining them soon.
Given that it takes about 13 km/s to reach GEO, how many sats could an orbital bot service? Each sat rendezvous takes some delta V.
This is what makes Spudis’ lunar propellent mines interesting. An extra-terrestrial propellent source would enable an orbital bot to rendezvous with an unlimited number of sats. I believe Spudis is correct when he says an extra-terrestrial propellent source would make the “launch, use, discard” paradigm obsolete. Another possible propellent source is carbonaceous chondrite NEAs. Asteroidal water is one of the commodities PR and DSI have their eye on.
Economic sat maintenance and upgrades would be a boon to commerce. And the orbital bots could have tremendous military value.
In 2007 the Chinese tested a kinetic anti-sat weapon. A Good fraction of the present orbital debris in LEO came from that test. A runaway Kessler syndrome would bar everyone from space. So such weapons are in nobody’s best interest.
However an orbital maintenance bot could not only disable an orbital military asset. It could turn it. Without generating any orbital debris.
I assume that the goal of the servicing standards process is to get away from a situation in which the servicing equipment for any given satellite has to be designed around the quirks of its particular design.
If there are standards for how satellites expose serviceable components and for which equipment a service satellite must carry, you can design a standard interface for how the two will interact. Then you can put a generic service satellite in orbit that will be able to carry out maintenance on any satellite that is compatible with the same standards, at least within any orbital range that it can reach.
Once that capability exists, there is a strong incentive for anyone designing a satellite to conform to the standards that make it serviceable, as this reduces the risk of failure in orbit and extends the service life. This in turn increases the demand for satellite repair services and reduces the financial risk of parking a repair satellite in orbit until it is needed.
It looks like one of those “high inertia” industries where it is difficult to get started, but once you get past the initial barriers to entry the growth rapidly accelerates.