Space Tugboat to Refuel Satellites

Faeton sent in this article about a proposed space tugboat to refuel aging satellites. Looks like they're just going to bolt on some extra thrusters with a new fuel supply, guidance system, etc.

Comments

Is it really a tugboat?

[cperciva]

The title calls this a "tugboat", but as far as I can see from the article, it is really just an extra fuel tank and set of rockets.

A real tugboat would be very cool indeed -- something which could grab a satellite, move it up back into the correct orbit, and then let go and move on to the next satellite -- but it looks like this is rather less so.

Garbage collection

[jukal]

Both of the articles mentioned that fuel is not the only problem, the rest of the satellite has degraded as well. So, why don't they come up with a good garbage collection method to periodically get rid of the old sattelites. This could also partially answer the problem that it's starting to be pretty crowded there in the orbit already.