Robot spacecraft to act like orbiting service stations
There’s a graveyard in space littered with the corpses of dozens of dead satellites, a remote spot in the cosmos reserved to entomb spacecraft at the end of their lives.
Even the most robust and expensive satellites eventually break down or run out of fuel, and must be retired to a remote parking orbit more than 33,000 kilometres away, safely out of the way of other satellites. There, the graveyard holds billions of dollars worth of some of the most expensive hardware ever to leave the surface of the Earth.
Now, the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA and other groups are developing technologies that would extend the life of the critical infrastructure in space. If successful, the agencies would have fleets of robots with arms and cameras that could inspect, refuel and repair satellites, keeping them operational well beyond their expected lifetimes. The spacecraft might even upgrade the satellites they service with the latest technology, like an iPhone update.
“Where else do we build something that costs a billion dollars, and then never inspect it, never maintain it, and never repair it?” said Gordon Roesler, the program manager at DARPA. “But that’s what we do in space.”
That may be changing as a wave of innovation takes root in the space industry, much of it driven by private billionaires and commercial enterprises. There are companies building lunar landers and others developing probes that could lead to the mining of celestial bodies. Still others are working on 3-D printers designed to build things in space.
“Everything that we now do on Earth we will eventually do on-orbit,” said Richard White, the president of SSL Government Systems, which is working with DARPA on the program.
“The satellite-manufacturing facility of the future could be located in space.”