Satellite Servicing Initiative Gets a Big Boost
MDA Sells Majority Stake in its Satellite Servicing Business and Gets its First Customer, SpaceQ
“MDA, which had announced in early May the creation of Space Infrastructure Services (SIS) to handle its nascent satellite servicing business, today announced that Finance Technology Leverage LLC would take a majority stake in SIS and that global satellite communications company SES would be its first customer.”
“As part of today’s announcement, SIS has awarded a contract to MDA’s U.S. division, SSL, a contract valued at US$228 million (CA$305 million).”
It’s about time. It will be quite exciting to have a commercial satellite be refueled in orbit, especially since it surely wasn’t originally designed to be refueled in orbit.
I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the satellite was designed for on-orbit refueling. The customer is SES, and they have been thinking about this sort of thing for several years. They might have ordered satellites with a potential for refueling. At the same time, I have trouble imagining how you would refuel a satellite which _wasn’t_ designed for it. Pre-launch fueling for most spacecraft is a very manual process; it isn’t exactly like unscrewing a gas cap and inserting the nozzle from the pump.
True. Hopefully future articles will include more details. But from what I remember reading about in the past, the USAF wants to have the ability to do just that: refuel satellites not originally intended to be refueled in orbit.
I wonder if that makes sense. The technology development required to refuel satellites which weren’t designed for it seems substantial. I’d think designing the next generation of satellites for refueling and retiring the older ones would be easier. Then again, the same people have also said words about servicing, and that could be driving the technology development.
Your reasoning makes sense. But I would also note that space shuttle astronauts serviced parts of satellites that were never designed for in orbit servicing. Some of the work done on Hubble was exactly this sort of work.
The only difference here is that you’re using robotics to do the servicing. While that introduces some challenges, in other ways robotics are easier. Your robot doesn’t have a hard time limit on each “EVA” that an astronaut does.
😉
If the Hubble example is the repairing the STIS instrument on SM4, that involved a lot of very custom parts (or jigs or whatever) built just for that purpose. I’m glad they fixed STIS, but it’s not a fantastic example of ease of servicing…
Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) was also repaired on SM4. Yes the “capture plates” to keep screws from floating away were specifically designed for this mission. This sort of approach may, or may not, be directly applicable to future robotic servicing missions.
During SM3B, NICMOS was repaired by adding a cryocooler since its original stored solid nitrogen cryogen was used up prematurely due to an unanticipated heat leak. I’m not sure if in orbit servicing of this type was originally designed into NIMCOS, but I get the impression that it was not. At any rate, this is another example of the repair of an instrument instead of a replacement. As I understand it, Hubble was designed for entire instrument replacements, not for instruments to be repaired in orbit.
. Wrong thread. Oops.
Can someone explain how this makes any economic sense at all? The robotic mechanism to refuel (planned or not) will likely cost close to what a new communications SC should cost, and the launch costs are a wash. And in the end you end up with a refueled aged SC.
Once on a geostationary orbit, the spacecraft could move around and service/refuel multiple communications satellites. If it were a single refueling, it probably wouldn’t be viable.
It’s worth noting that the first customer the story mentions is SES. They operate over fifty communications satellites and have an annual revenue of $2 billion. They are in a very good position to know how much refueling is worth, and apparently think this makes economic sense. Probably; they may think it makes long-term sense and could be taking a loss on the first refueling.
Along these lines, a presentation at the NASA Vision 2050 meeting mentioned that the government of Luxembourg (a major shareholder in SES) is investing in asteroid resource development. Their interest is all about in-space refueling and servicing, including a tug to transfer satellites from low Earth to geostationary orbits.
Would it not be simpler to design a unit that would fasten itself to the satellite, replacing the bird’s thrusters?
And I can think of a host of reasons this wouldn’t work: center of gravity, and the fact that the satellites computers talk to the on-board thrusters. Still, those big critters are very expensive.
I don’t follow the communications satellite news enough to know: how often, I wonder, is a functional satellite retired due to fuel consumption?
I believe that is already being worked on as well, but I’m not sure by whom. The disadvantage of this approach is that you have to launch a separate satellite to provide fuel and thrusters to each satellite which needs this service. One servicing/refueling satellite could service multiple communications satellites.
There are a whole lot of things you could do, if the communications satellite was designed servicing. But if it isn’t designed for it, attaching a propulsion module would involve duplicate systems (it would need its own power, attitude control, etc.)
As for lifetime, I’m not sure what the most common limits are. In the past decade or so, communications satellites have been shifting to electric propulsion to extend life without increasing fuel mass. So that’s definitely a concern. I’ll accept the fact that DARPA and SES are seriously interested in refueling as proof that someone thinks it’s worthwhile.