Orbital Operations Company Stellar scale ABC has revealed new details about its approach to refueling satellites in space, as part of a $25.5 million project to explore the concept with the Space Force. The solution they came up with is a bit like a AAA truck traveling at 25,000 miles per hour.
The concept of in-orbit servicing and repair is attractive to anyone who doesn’t want to see a $100 million investment literally go to waste. Many satellites are perfectly functional after years in space, but simply lack the fuel needed to safely maintain their altitude and trajectory, and must be allowed to deorbit instead.
You could Roll out another $100 million satellite — or perhaps, as companies like Astroscale and OrbitFab have suggested, you could spend a tenth of that to do a gas run from the surface to geosynchronous orbit.
Of course, most satellites aren’t designed for refueling, but that could easily change — even if how to do so is an open question. Astroscale won a Space Force contract last summer to explore the possibility in orbit, and the company has just published how it plans to do so.
Astroscale Prototype Service Refueling, or APS-R, is a small satellite (funnily enough, “the size of a gas pump”) that will ascend into Earth’s orbit – at an altitude of about 300 kilometers – and then descend on an “equipped customer” with the correct refueling port. (This client is still in the form of “for example” in the chart, so there is no official plan yet.)
After refueling, APS-R will step back and perform an inspection of the customer satellite, looking for any fuel leaks or other issues its operators may want to check. It then ascends to GEO+ again and rendezvous with the RAPIDS Defense Innovation Unit fuel depot, which is exactly what it sounds like: an orbital fuel station.
Image credits: Stellar scale
Some other space refueling concepts opt for the relative simplicity of keeping all the fuel on the vehicle itself rather than acting as an emergency shuttle between the station and the customer (hence the AAA comparison). But just as the military seems to think a giant geostationary pressure vessel filled with hydrazine is the safer option, Astroscale agrees. For all we know, there may be a standalone version for non-military use in the future.
This joint project – mainly split into medium cost – is still in the “concept of operations” stage, but Astroscale expects to deliver it by 2026. No doubt we’ll be hearing more about this and other space sustainment projects long before then. then.