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Pentagon's In-Orbit Satellite Recycling Program Moving Forward
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.
If it's typical Pentagon work, it will be contracted out to a bunch of Senators' favorite contractors, will end up costing 10x the original projection in just the first year, and after several years of failures and cost overruns they'll either quietly scrap the program entirely or end up spending an order of magnitude more to refurb a single satellite than to just launch a new one--all to produce a refurb which will be wonky, useless, and failure prone.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
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).
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
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.
I can see the fnords!
Isn't this the same agency that funded the corpse-eating robot? It all makes sense now. It will kill and eat astronauts and cosmonauts for power. Then it will make copies of itself from various satellites. Finally, it's clone army will come to Earth and devour us all.
Maybe this will spur enough public interest to bring back the Space Quest series.
It's another small step, but definitely not the first step. Unless you don't consider the ISS as space craft and a fairly big thing in orbit.
1. make a company 2. find investors & show your plans 3. launch craft to space around earth 4. clean everyone's crap and make them pay 5. profit 6. huge profit 7. fuck load of profit (optional) 8. buy Nasa 9. change how they work since it's needs lots of changes (look at history and you'll know what mistakes they've done) 10. profit again
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.
Will somebody come to their senses and shoot down this stupid idea? And, in the process, save us taxpayers millions of dollars now (and, likely, billions later)?
I am a proponent of space activities, but this is just abysmally stupid and will be an incredibly expensive boondoggle.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
"If we're ever going to build space craft and other things in orbit, this seems like a great first step."
What, you mean like the ISS (over 100m long and 70m wide)?
I think we took the first steps in building things in orbit quite a long time ago.
I still think this is a very cool idea though, and the more practice we get at building stuff in space the better.
Paul Leader
Building reliable satellites is a long and expensive process, even in the best of situations here on earth. Re purposing an already built and flying one in space is surely going to be even worse, producing really expensive and unreliable satellites in the process.
This is like trying to do an overhaul of a fighter jet avionics while the thing is in flight. Yea, you could possibly do it, but why would you want too try?
Now if they want to start designing into satellites a way to make re-provisioning of satellites while in orbit possible, like adding ways to easily attach more fuel or replace payload modules, I'd find it worthwhile. Perhaps even standardizing a way to build satellites out of modular components that share a base interface so it is possible to just assemble them like tinker toys in space would be workable. But simply trying to rebuild something not designed to be worked on from the mounds of junk already in orbit is not going to have much success, is going to be very expensive, and is likely going to require manned spaceflight (something we don't do here in the USA right now) and the likelihood of success is pretty low.
Efforts like the refurbishment of Hubble aside, this effort seems doomed for failure, unless the components they are trying to use are designed for reuse and happen to be in the correct orbit.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Why not just launch the woefully underutilized Maytag Repairman (and his dog) into space?
Vietnam Veteran / Former Postal Worker -- Use Caution When Taunting!
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.
-Styopa
small "microsats" with a single use booster. Release one that attaches to the target and then fires it's booster to deorbit the target. IF you used a solid fuel rocket you could make it very small and highly effective.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Where do you guys get the money to pay for all this? It seems like the US government pays tonnes of money to contractors who make profits and keep people employed. But where does the money come from? It looks like the world's largest welfare state but I can't see how the money loop gets closed. And Canada gets blamed for being a socialist blot on the north american map. Man, we get blamed for everything... oh wait.
Too much trouble. I'm just going to dump them on the nearest passing asteroid.
Have gnu, will travel.
I can't wait until these fully-armed satellites are safely put into orbit, away from grampa, away from the stairs
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"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
We all thought the machines we built somehow gained consciousness. Later we discovered they had built themselves.
I just hope this doesn't turn into a long and pointless tranfer orbit thread populated with people that don't understand that ellipses exist (and that changing to a different location in the same orbit doesn't come for free) like the last time this came up
That's a very good point and reminds me of Lem's funny "Pirx the Pilot" story where the hero brought in a version of himself from the future to hold the nut while he turned the bolt in microgravity.
What we need is a kind of "space truck" that can take astronauts up into space, let them live and work for weeks at a time while working on these satellites, and possibly bring them back from orbit. It would be great if this "space truck" was reusable as well. The added advantage is the government isn't beholden to foreign or private entities when we need to conduct repair or salvage operations in space.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
This is essentially a satellite grabber. It can "dock" with a satellite, attach things to it (presumably drill holes in it, too) and make the satellite do things - either things it used to be able to do, or things you'd like it to be able to do.
One thing that would be nice to do would be to deorbit large, useless satellites that are occupying prime orbital slots. Or to add controlled destruction to satellites that failed and are out of control (though I'd be surprised if this thing could stop a tumbling satellite).
The trick is, that all of these maintenance operations are only "good" when performed with remedial intent, on your own hardware or hardware of a space-faring nation who's asked for your help. The same technology can also be used to wreck the satellites of nations you don't like. The trick is to make sure nobody sees you doing the dirty deed.
Since most satellites don't have proximity detectors, or security cameras build into them, they won't see an approaching wrecker. All that will happen is your spy-sat suddenly goes dead. If you're lucky a groundstation from an independent country might have tracked the approach of a satellite wrecker and get you some sympathy after the fact. However once the wrecker satellites become non-reflective, impose radio silence and become covered in radar absorbent material, there will be no way to tell if your "reconnaissance" bird fell silent for technical reasons or if someone else helped it die.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It's a transport ship. Firefly class. Low-life vultures picking the flesh off the dead.
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.
~Idarubicin
I thought the line was "Need parts! Kill the fat one." not kill the little one.
If they can reuse parts from older satellites or reuse the old satellites that would be a good thing. They may be able to get rid of some of the bigger "space junk" that is up there. I am not sure if anything can be done with the paint chips and other smaller parts zipping around up there. Making a space dragger like the fishing boat dragger would also "catch" useful satellites.
Mechanical arms. What they want is a fishing line with a grabber on the end.
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.
I think this is the real reason, at least in the beginning. Prime orbital slots are getting scare and you can't make new ones. Getting RID of the junk by deorbiting the stuff makes sense, is technologically feasible and doesn't require the tool waving and silly economics of bringing duct tape to low earth orbit.
Of course, EVENTUALLY you need to learn how to fix things in orbit. The ISS and the Shuttle / Hubble repair missions have shown that we can do baby steps but we need to develop capabilities far in excess of what we have now. You're not going to make much progress if it takes you a year to choreograph a repair mission that very nearly got sidelined by an errant bolt.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Note to self: Pitch reality TV show to A&E hosted by Richard Dean Anderson and Steve Smith. Contestants must solve high-tech problems using only the household items that they are given. The items always include duct tape and empty beer cans.
Maybe they can call the show "Junk Drawer Wars"
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
last i heard he retired to PT-593 or something so he might be a bit slow in responding
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Number 1 already happened. Out of control comm satellite in Geosynchronous orbit.
Number 2 look up the orbital express darpa project. It was accused by a retired Russian general of being the cause the iridium crash a few years back.
If you send up a launch vehicle, and have it latch onto an existing orbiter, cant you use something to push the old satellite towards Earth. And push yourself into a higher orbit? It seems like it might be more efficient than hurling matter out of booster engines. You could use electromagnetic force.
Can you use pre-existing orbiters as "stepping stones"?
The electronics have a limited lifetime, the satellites probably have no maneuvering fuel, and aren't designed to be taken apart or refueled.
Use an ion-drive, solar powered 'tug' that goes from LEO to Geo-stationary orbit. Take a new satellite up, drop it off, find the nearest dead satellite, and use the tug to de-orbit the satellite as it returns to LEO. Using an ion-drive vehicle keeps refueling costs for multiple missions low.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantrid