Back to the Future - Serviceable Spacecraft Make a Comeback

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Also needed is a robotic servicing vehicle. Reed said his organization has focused on developing that capability, as well. For the past few years, the organization has pursued a notional mission called Restore, which would be capable of refueling satellites in both geostationary and low-Earth orbits.

Key servicing technologies, he said, are baselined for NASA’s proposed asteroid mission, ARM, which involves the capture of a large boulder from the surface of a near-Earth asteroid and moving it into a stable orbit around the moon for astronaut exploration. The same type of spacecraft also could refuel a government satellite in low-Earth orbit, as called for in NASA’s RFI.

“I can imagine a fleet of Restores,” Reed said. “A single servicer could refuel and service WFIRST and another future observatory at the SEL2 orbit. Another could be parked in another orbit for other servicing tasks, such as helping assemble a 65-foot segmented mirror in space, he said.

“We’re taking all we learned over the past many years, robots and humans working together,” Keer added. “Our attitude here is you have to have one foot in the future. We expect to be on the cutting edge. Servicing at more distant orbits, such as SEL2, is coming,” she said.

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