Repair, recycle, reuse.
Three words that will apply to space soon! Up to now, launching anything in space was almost a definite action. There was no way to intervene on the launched item, with maybe the famous exception of the Hubble Space Telescope, which got a facelift through several missions led by the now defunct Space Shuttle. And of course, SpaceX is reusing the first stage of its rockets… but after having brought them back to Earth.
Here we are talking about repairing a satellite right in space, with a robotic intervention vehicle, capable of refurbishing many orbiting spacecraft on a single flight. That is the project that the American firm Northrop Grumman is developing.
More generally, space agencies are also looking into manufacturing stuff right in space, and of course also repairing them up there, as this very detailed article in Quartz explains (read below). It might be tailored to the space-geeks. But for the non-nerds, just watching the adaptive video (with or without AR) provided by Northrop Grumman is interesting, or at least makes a boring topic – recycling – definitely fascinating.
- Olivier Dessibourg
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