The US Department of Defense’s DARPA research arm has called for information to create a PPP to launch a robotic satellite servicing mission in five years.
The agency has been looking at ways to salvage components on expired satellites under its…
The US Department of Defense’s DARPA research arm has called for information to create a PPP to launch a robotic satellite servicing mission in five years.
The agency has been looking at ways to salvage components on expired satellites under its Phoenix programme for a number of years, and this latest project will see it team up with commercial and private players to potentially inspect, fix, refuel or move birds in geostationary orbits.
DARPA programme manager Gordon Roesler said the Request for Information is the “first concrete steps toward viable satellite-servicing capabilities in GEO”, where the majority of satellites are commercially-owned.
The RfI centres on two areas: Technical characteristics for a robotic servicer that would build on the technology it has already developed; and information on business arrangements and practices that would facilitate a sustainable spacecraft servicing enterprise.
“Creating a public-private partnership is an innovative way to ensure that GEO robotic servicing gets community buy-in to succeed long term,” said Roesler.
The space community has long flirted with the idea of spacecraft that can deal with satellites that are malfunctioning, running out of fuel or in the wrong orbit, and a handful of industry-led ventures have already cropped up to try to meet this need.
Israel’s Effective Space Solutions is the latest to enter this space, recently causing waves when the start-up said its microsatellite solution could save Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites, after a 22 August rocket failure put them in the wrong orbit.
Meanwhile US-based Skycorp has secured an undisclosed customer to carry out the world’s first commercial on-orbit servicing in 2017.
In an email to SatelliteFinance on 4 September, Skycorp founder Dennis Wingo said it too hoped to go after the stranded Galileo birds, meaning its first launch could be even earlier in 2016.
DARPA said it is aware of other servicing development efforts, and would be open to “possible early-opportunity collaborations or partnerships involving such missions, including technology demonstration and maturation, data sharing, or testing”.
The deadline to respond to its RfI is 12:00 (ET) 3 November.
