By Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
WASHINGTON, July 2 (Reuters) – Weather and technical snags have forced NASA and its partner space company Katalyst to indefinitely postpone a first-of-its-kind mission to tow an aging U.S. satellite observatory into a safer orbit using a robot spacecraft, NASA said on Thursday.
The closely watched mission, organized on a short-notice production schedule of just nine months, would mark a key test of an orbital-grappling technology with major implications for both the commercial satellite industry and the U.S.-China space race.
But the rare, airborne rocket launch designed to send the rescue spacecraft to orbit from a jetliner over the Pacific has been delayed repeatedly by weather and technical difficulties this week, leading the mission team to indefinitely postpone the flight.
According to NASA, the latest unspecified issue was with the launch vehicle, a Pegasus XL rocket built by Northrop Grumman, which is supposed to carry Katalyst’s half-ton spacecraft, called LINK, into low-Earth orbit.
LINK was specially built to save the $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory by latching onto the crippled satellite and toting it to a higher, sustainable orbit, potentially extending its mission by years.
The observatory, also known as SWIFT, has no onboard propulsion capabilities and would otherwise drift naturally toward Earth and burn up in the atmosphere by later this year.
Katalyst Space Technologies, headquartered in Flagstaff, Arizona, said it designed, constructed and tested the LINK vehicle on an unprecedented nine-month production schedule, under a $30 million NASA contract.
Plans call for the spacecraft to be deployed from the payload compartment of the Pegasus rocket, which would soar into space after being released from the belly of a Lockheed TriStar jetliner flying some 40,000 feet (12,200 meters) over the Pacific.
The plane would take off headed east from a U.S. air base on the tiny Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
AIRBORNE LAUNCH TO ORBIT
Once jettisoned from the Pegasus rocket, LINK would head off on a month-long voyage to the vicinity of NASA’s orbiting telescope, which has been observing distant galaxies and black holes since 2004. It was originally designed for the study of gamma ray bursts in the cosmos.
By late July, if all goes according to plan, LINK will fly to within roughly 6 miles (9.6 km) of the observatory before initiating its final approach and “proximity operations.”
The autonomous spacecraft, equipped with three sets of thrusters and five sensor systems, is then expected to take another week to rendezvous with SWIFT and use its three robot arms, each fitted with hand-like grippers, to gently grab hold of the satellite. The pair would orbit Earth in tandem at roughly 17,000 miles (27,360 km) per hour.
Once LINK has firmly grasped the observatory, it should take another 60 days to tow it to its target altitude about 373 miles (600 km) above Earth, double the height it will have fallen to just before rescue, according to Katalyst.
The spacecraft is expected to complete its primary mission of satellite recovery with enough propellant left over to practice additional close-proximity maneuvers using SWIFT as a stationary dance partner in orbit.
The SWIFT orbital boost effort, the first U.S. mission of its kind, is being closely watched as a trial run of a key satellite-maintenance technology with potential dual-use military applications, representing some of the latest advances propelled by U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry.
“The U.S. Space Command cares a lot about this, because ultimately this is a core element of space superiority,” Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee told Reuters in a recent interview.
China last year demonstrated two satellites orbiting in close proximity, following a 2022 test in which one Chinese satellite grappled onto and yanked another into a different orbit — alarming U.S. officials who said China could one day employ such tactics on American spacecraft.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Will Dunham)
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