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* https://science.nasa.gov/mission/swift/swift-boost-mission/
wait that reminds me, what happened with the SWIFT rescue attempt recently to lift it into a higher orbit? * https://science.nasa.gov/mission/swift/swift-boost-mission/ * https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/
It's not exactly the first, this is the first (unclassified, that we know about) satellite to go up and grapple a satellite in geostationary and provide stationkeeping functions for it, which did so back in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Extension_Vehicle This is all very novel because in the relatively long history of humans sticking stuff in geostationary orbit, not once until 2020 had any sort of miss…
There's a tendency for such experimental servicing missions (e.g DARPA Orbital Express) to take place in lower orbits, along with all the crewed space station docking and shuttle servicing missions. LEO is cheaper for servicing demonstrations, more human-friendly and also where the Hubble Space Telescope that took a fair bit of servicing happens to be based. But for the robotics, sufficiently advanced autonomy for the latency not to be a major issue is also important.
It's not exactly the first, this is the first (unclassified, that we know about) satellite to go up and grapple a satellite in geostationary and provide stationkeeping functions for it, which did so back in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Extension_Vehicle This is all very novel because in the relatively long history of humans sticking stuff in geostationary orbit, not once until 2020 had any sort of miss…
The multi-purpose robotic manipulation makes this a bit more advanced and experimental than the dedicated MEV attachment, as useful and performant as the MEV has been. China also demonstrated robotic grappling and towing in GEO in 2021. A few other US and European experimental robotic servicing missions in the pipeline, involving both Active Debris Removal grappling and robotic arms playing with designated payloads a…
the probe ramming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJZ3xmuom0M
One of the things that people who don't pay attention to space based infrastructure find odd, if you tell them, is that in the entire history of manned spaceflight no human has ever gone to geostationary orbit.
Robots get the best jobs...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Defense doesn’t get DOGE’d, only programs that build up communities do. There’s always budget for more destruction.
Wait until you find out which agency founded the Internet
> Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the RSGS payload is designed and developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The payload is integrated on the Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) spacecraft, developed by SpaceLogitistics, a Northrop Grumman company, and was launched onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. That's quite a who's who of public-private partnership. It's fascinating to watc…
Almost all the ‘servicing’ and ‘orbital debris cleanup’ robot-arm sats are funded quite heavily by military end users, because there is really no market for their stated aims and a huge market for the unstated aims - flying up to an adversary’s satellite and messing it up. Open secret in the industry.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=russian+s...
Outside of GEO, nobody in the public really knows what the X-37 does when it's in orbit, but one of the theories I have seen thrown around is that it's capable of approaching and inspecting other things in LEO, or theoretically even grabbing or manipulating one in some way.