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.
Best idea from the Pentagon in a while (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
If just one of the radio receiver, radio transmitter fails, the solar panel fails, the engine (gyroscope or whatever) fails, it is worthless, even if everything else still works.
The trick of course will be to standardize the parts to make it easier to mix and match.
Strange idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Dr Frankensat
I have a strange idea. What if its not Frankenstein like but more "siamese twin" like?
So the batteries fail on this sat and the charger on another sat, duct tape them together, run an extension cord... Yes I realize its not always going to be simple and there are no world wide standards. But its interesting to think about "siamese twin" sat work instead of the provided assumption/example of Frankenstein work.
Imagine a comsat with nearly full positioning fuel tanks and good thrusters and dead traveling wave tubes in the transmitter section or the antenna failed on deployment or whatever, duct taped to a perfectly working comsat with nearly empty positioning tanks...You may not even have to do wiring, some weird scenarios might require nothing other than two arms and a roll of duct tape, or aerospace grade kapton tape or whatever they use. I imagine just mushing them together might have some interesting thermal issues, those could be worked around, probably.
To do ANYTHING yes you'd need a full orbiting machine shop, and a full SMD rework station, and probably a solar powered foundry to make castings. But as decades (centuries?) of high tech redneck engineering proves, you can none the less do a hell of a lot with just duct tape, jb weld, and bailing wire. You can imagine this looking all liquid metal terminator 3 or whatever, but I'm thinking its gonna look a lot more "hold my beer and watch this"
Re:Pentagon work (Score:4, Interesting)
Hilariously, DARPA apparently created onion routing! I guess the NSA/CIA/TLA didn't realize what they were doing until it was too late.
Re:Pentagon work (Score:5, Interesting)
DARPA promotes research. That's what it's for.
Products do not appear magically on the shelves at stores. Scientific advances do not immediately turn into things you can buy. They have to go through a research and design phase, which is what DARPA promotes. There's an engineering and application phase that follows, which DARPA isn't generally involved in. After that, there's marketing and commercialization, which is completely out of the realm of DARPA.
In the case of self-driving cars, you probably won't be able to buy one for personal use on the highway for a long, long time. In the shorter term, you may be able to ride in an automated taxi at a resort. You might see automated trucks that follow a human-driven truck on the interstate. You might see cars that can park themselves. It'll likely be a long time before you can buy a personal automated car for use on the public streets.
Re:If it works... (Score:4, Interesting)
If one collision is anywhere near likely to trigger the Kessler effect, wouldn't it have most likely happened by now?
After all, several nations have blown up satellites in orbit. That is far more likely to have caused the Kessler effect than a collision between two satellites resulting in an unknown, uncontrolled orbit. We already have satellites up there that are uncontrolled.