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).

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.

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: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aloft to repair and enable broken space junk that even if restored to functional within a year or three is grossly outdated by new advances in hardware.

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: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

[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".