Pentagon's In-Orbit Satellite Recycling Program Moving Forward 115
An anonymous reader writes with an update on DARPA's plans to rebuild satellites in orbit. "A year old DARPA program which aims to recycle satellites in orbit has started its next phase by looking for a guinea pig defunct satellite to use for evaluating the technology required. The program involves a Dr Frankensat 'complete with mechanical arms and other "unique tools"' and blank "satlets" to build upon.' Need parts! Kill the little one!"
If we're ever going to build space craft and other things in orbit, this seems like a great first step.
Re:Pentagon work (Score:5, Insightful)
You're quite unfamiliar with how DARPA works, aren't you?
Wait. That's not a question. You obviously are.
If it works... (Score:5, Insightful)
If it works, great. If it doesn't, one collision can set us back *decades* in terms of the Kessler effect (i.e. space junk that makes it harder to launch/maintain orbit without more collisions).
DARPA Hard (Score:5, Insightful)
DARPA doesn't do anything little, or incremental, or obvious. In the jargon it's gotta be "DARPA Hard."
The obvious, incremental technology would be to build satellites so that they could be refueled on orbit by something like this Pheonix spacecraft.
But no! That's too easy. It's gotta be a McGuyver. Anything else is aiming too low.
Something useful will come of this program, it typically does. And, as usual, it may not be what they expected nor will it necessarily be immediately practical.
However, that's exactly what DARPA is paying for.
Sure, it's to 'recycle' them (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that this has NOTHING to do with the X37, and any conceivable plan to disable/grab/dissect/plunder Chinese/Russian satellites in orbit.
No, no, we're going to send a multimillion-dollar mission aloft to repair and enable broken space junk that even if restored to functional within a year or three is grossly outdated by new advances in hardware.
Re:Pentagon work (Score:5, Insightful)
DARPA sure gave an enormous boost to computer-driven cars. In my opinion, DARPA has done a lot to advance science... it is a shame that so much science seems to depend on military whims, however.
Re:Best idea from the Pentagon in a while (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems fairly obvious to me - Satellites become useless if just a few key parts fail, leaving the rest of the equipment in perfect working order.
The problem is if you gathered 200 old satellites you'd probably have 190 marginal to outright dead batteries, 200 mostly empty maneuvering/positioning fuel tanks, and 200 radiation damaged solar panel arrays.
You pretty much get to keep the perhaps decades obsolete electronics and the chassis, and those don't weigh much. So if you have to launch 80% of the mass of a new satellite to get a remanufactured old satellite, you're better off launching 100% of the mass for a completely new satellite that was integrated and checked out on the ground.
You can also imagine the agony if after rebuilding a week later the 25 year old battery charger fried wasting all the work.
There's a reason why old cars are scrapped instead of merely replacing the rusty chassis, worn engine, worn transmission, worn tires, worn suspension, rusted dinged body panels, worn carpet, ancient/obsolete cassette player radio... If the only thing you're keeping is the comfy drivers seat, just remove it and place it in a new car, if you must, because it makes no financial sense to replace "everything else" on the old car.
We're being actively misled about purpose of this (Score:4, Insightful)
Satellites fail, for the most part, when their rechargeable batteries quit and/or their consumable manoeuvring fuel runs out. These are among the heavier components aboard many satellites, so our hypothetical 'repair and resupply' launch is already going to be costly and heavy before you add all that unique and highly flexible hypothetical manipulator hardware. From any sort of rational economic standpoint, if you're going to launch a heavy, expensive satellite, you might as well launch a replacement (with all-new hardware, up-to-date electronics, incorporating the lessons learned from the previous iteration, etc.) instead of trying to fix or cannibalize the dodgy one in orbit.
Trying to service multiple satellites with one launch of our Swiss-Army-knife repair droid gets even worse, because manoeuvring between orbits tends to be very costly in terms of fuel (prohibitively so if a significant change in inclination is contemplated) and therefore weight.
And how user-serviceable are most satellites? Anything that's already in space now (or that is likely to be launched in the next decade) hasn't been designed to be repaired, modified, or scavenged after launch. Are we really solving the 'space junk' problem if our repair droid is inadvertently leaving behind a cloud of dropped screws and broken hardware? One satellite is easy to track and avoid. A haze of screws and plastic chips is not--and will still put a hole right through the ISS.
The folks at DARPA are sometimes crazy, but they're not usually idiots. Presumably they've been able to come up with the same objections as Slashdotters, and they probably realized them faster than we did. So what's really going on?
1) A stripped-down version of this tool could be used to attach de-orbiting or manoeuvring thrusters to disabled satellites that happened to be occupying (or threatening) particularly high-value orbital real estate. The ISS has to be periodically repositioned to avoid the occasional bit of space junk. Further up, there's a limited amount of space in geostationary orbit, and a malfunctioning satellite could be trouble as either a source of physical or radio clutter. If the program fails to produce its rather pie-in-the-sky 'dream' goal, it could still develop this useful sideline.
2) The military would love to have the capability to selectively damage, disable, and/or capture 'enemy' space hardware. This program would complete nearly all the steps required to develop such a capability, but under the shiny, happy patina of putative civilian applications.