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:
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 mission gone out to geostationary and intentionally grappled or docked with another satellite.
petcat 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 watch these commercial space industries develop in real-time.
ballooney 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cameron_b 2 hours ago [-]
As I understand it, the current on-orbit service functions include... orbit manipulations.
Any service functions of existing equipment would depend on charge interface or communications functions that are not exposed or standardized.
It will make a good season to practice kinetic adjustments until the fleets start shipping terminals for Astromech droids.
ramgine 2 hours ago [-]
TIL DARPA is still around. Kind of thought they got the “doge” treatment
pennomi 2 hours ago [-]
Defense doesn’t get DOGE’d, only programs that build up communities do. There’s always budget for more destruction.
ButlerianJihad 1 hours ago [-]
Wait until you find out which agency founded the Internet
wrs 1 hours ago [-]
But why isn’t it called WARPA now?
petcat 2 hours ago [-]
DOGE got DOGE'd itself. It doesn't exist anymore.
redbridgerock 2 hours ago [-]
Woah dual robot arms with tools on it! I have past experience using a CNC machine and I to this day remember how laborious it was to edit g-code and try to fine tune it. I cannot imagine the amount of work it would take to do that for something in space and on a robot arm. That is awesome.
sivex 45 minutes ago [-]
No mention of OSAM-1, $2 billion NASA mission cancelled due to delays, and likely due to this mission beating it to launch.
ck2 22 minutes ago [-]
wait that reminds me, what happened with the SWIFT rescue attempt recently to lift it into a higher orbit?
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 mission gone out to geostationary and intentionally grappled or docked with another satellite.
That's quite a who's who of public-private partnership. It's fascinating to watch these commercial space industries develop in real-time.
Any service functions of existing equipment would depend on charge interface or communications functions that are not exposed or standardized.
It will make a good season to practice kinetic adjustments until the fleets start shipping terminals for Astromech droids.
* https://science.nasa.gov/mission/swift/swift-boost-mission/
* https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/