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.

Comments

Re:Pentagon work

[bughunter]

You're quite unfamiliar with how DARPA works, aren't you?

Wait. That's not a question. You obviously are.

If it works...

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

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).

Re:If it works...

[dasunt]

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).

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.

Re:If it works...

[DanielRavenNest]

I have a solution for that. Combine scoop mining of the Earth's atmosphere and mining the debris belt for raw materials/working parts/satellite refuel and repair station:

* http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Resource_Extraction#Scoop_Mining

* http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Orbital_Mining2

The first gives you a relatively cheap source of fuel for your electric thruster to putter around orbit, the second makes use of that fuel to do something useful. Depending on the state of the dead satellite or debris you can either:

- Lower it's orbit enough to re-enter quickly if you can't make any other use of it
- Feed it into a processing unit as raw materials
- Salvage it for working parts
- Repair broken parts to return satellite to operation
- Refuel satellites that are otherwise functional and just ran out of fuel.

It's basically the same service a tow truck and garage provides on Earth, except in space. If we never picked up road debris on Earth, it would be a mess too. What we were lacking is an efficient way to pick up space debris, and the combination of mining air from low orbit + electric thrusters is around a 100 times improvement in propulsion efficiency.

Re:If it works...

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

The issue is that when two satellites collide, they tend to create more junk--it's not just unplanned orbits, it's stuff breaking apart and going in lots of different directions.

"Several Nations" pretty much means China, at least in recent history. But their test of their anti-satellite weapon actually did set us back decades.

Basically, a lot of stuff falls to earth slowly, so lower orbits empty of old junk over time. When stuff collides and shatters into lots of pieces, all going every which way, it undoes a huge amount of the clearer orbits we gain from stuff falling.

DARPA Hard

[bughunter]

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.

Roger Wilco

[Russ1642]

Maybe this will spur enough public interest to bring back the Space Quest series.

Re:Roger Wilco

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI:
SpaceVenture, a KickStarter project by the creators of Space Quest (successfully funded but still accepting PayPal donations)

Re:Roger Wilco

[crazyjj]

Sounds more like Salvage 1.

Another (small) step

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

If we're ever going to build space craft and other things in orbit, this seems like a great first step.

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.

Re:Another (small) step

[bluefoxlucid]

It's ridiculous is what it is. Tons of fuel and energy to course correct in 3D and do computer calculations without a fixed anchor point. Gravity is excellent for making sure things hold together the way you want; weightlessness is excellent for making things move in a slow, controlled manner. Too bad weight and mass are two different things.

We can't absolute match speeds, stuff drifts and pushing against something causes lots of shifting with nothing to reset the momentum. Leveraging against gravity is a fantastic tool: you don't have to worry about nudging something and then pulling it back to stop it in place (along with anything it touches/pushes against). In space, you'll need to push as hard to move something in any direction as you would to push it sideways on earth; you'll have to push a lot harder (in fact, as hard to move it in any direction) to move it "down"; and you gain the advantage of not having to push so hard to move things "up". Seems like a minimal gain for all the hassle and energy expenditure needed to manage shit flying all over the place.

Assembly in minor gravity--such as on the moon--makes more sense.

Re:Another (small) step

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

Assembly in minor gravity--such as on the moon--makes more sense.

It probably won't waste that much more fuel to get from LEO to the moon, the one place with any significant gravity consistently nearest the Earth. But the equation changes greatly when you have to land stuff then hurl it back into space (the reason perhaps why the Russians are bold enough to offer cow jumps over the moon but not visits to the Apollo landing site). A cost-effective moon-based manufacturing requires the development of a mining industry or in situ resource utilization. Magnets and robotic arms can solve much of the floating all over the place problem.

Re:Another (small) step

[dpilot]

Most spacecraft can do something significant to change their orbits. While the ISS does have a thruster system, it's just for maintaining the existing orbit and making minor changes to avoid junk.

If you really want to blur the line, try a Cycler.

Best idea from the Pentagon in a while

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Best idea from the Pentagon in a while

[vlm]

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.

Re:Best idea from the Pentagon in a while

[Muad'Dave]

Are you kidding??? Do you have any idea how abjectly destitute the average Cuban is, thanks to Castro? They may have great health care and education, but that's about it. I talk to Cubans regularly via amateur radio, and I'm constantly amazed at how well they manage to keep their radios going with nothing more than spit and bailing wire.

The only reason they drive 50's vintage cars is because that's all that were on the island at the time of Castro's takeover - no one can afford a new car, even if they were allowed to import one!

From wikipedia:
"Typical wages range from factory worker's 400 non-convertible Cuban pesos a month to doctor's 700. That is around 17-30 U.S. dollars a month."
"After Cuba lost subsidies in 1991, malnutrition resulted in an outbreak of diseases and general hunger."
"Pensions are among the smallest in the Western hemisphere at $9.50. In 2009, Raul Castro increased minimum pensions by 2 dollars, which he said was to recompense for those who have "dedicated a great part of their lives to working... and who remain firm in defense of socialism"."

Re:Pentagon work

[ganjadude]

yeah, like that crazy internet thing, no body uses it

Sure, it's to 'recycle' them

[argStyopa]

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.

Why not just de-orbit them?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Pentagon work

[SuricouRaven]

DARPA runs high-risk high-payoff research. Ninety-nine out of a hundred things they try fail - but the one that actually works is revolutionary.

Re:Pentagon work

[MyLongNickName]

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.

If this is like ....

[PPH]

... Seattle's recycling program, were going to have to separate the navigation, communications and orbiting thermonuclear weapons platforms. And we will have to remove and fold the solar panels. Then we'll have to have them in the correctly marked bin, ready for pickup on Wednesdays.

Too much trouble. I'm just going to dump them on the nearest passing asteroid.

Strange idea

[vlm]

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:Strange idea

[dbIII]

So the batteries fail on this sat and the charger on another sat, duct tape them together, run an extension cord

Mir!
OK, that's not very fair to a very successful long running project, but they did have a few quick fixes along those lines that worked well.

probably a solar powered foundry to make castings

There's been a push to get casting experiments going on the ISS since before it's proposed name was settled. Maybe there is something very small along those lines already.

Re:Pentagon work

[ZeroSumHappiness]

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

[spauldo]

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:Pentagon work

[networkBoy]

Ya know... I might actually watch that. what kind of high tech problems are we talking about?

We're being actively misled about purpose of this

[Idarubicin]

Other posters have already observed some of the obvious flaws in this scheme.

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.

Re:Pentagon work

[MyLongNickName]

Okay, let's try

* GPS
* Stealth Technology
* Materials that are currently used in electronics today
* Real-time voice to text translation
* Advances in certain types of lasers

Your argument is basically that spending on future tech has a high failure rate. To that I say "duh, of course it does".