Zombie Ops in GEO

Too bad we are not there to take it out of GEO and to the graveyard orbit.

Hopefully this is an opportunity to educate the industry on the need for your services. Unfortunately the adoption of innovations in industries are often reactive and rather then proactive.

Perhaps its time for a few op-eds to drive the lesson home?

And pray tell what "you" would have done, by which I guess you mean astronauts with capacity to go in GEO?

This is a malfunctioning, not a dead satellite. The only way to remove it as a problem is either to take it away or push it out of the way, neither of which sounds particularly easy...

In any case this would only have a remote chance of working if satellites were designed with human intervention in mind, i.e. an "off" button on the top floor, or a hook with which to drag it, for instance.

And this assumes that IntelSat actually cares about the problems they cause. Unless they are threatened with costly legal action, they probably don't.

Oh and by the way even if a GEO service infrastructure is developed, it's not really clear to me how much of it would need to be manned, if any...

In the real world, it is still much more economical and practical for satellite operators to treat satellites as expendable pieces of kit. It's going to be very hard to change that.

A.

And pray tell what "you" would have done, by which I guess you mean astronauts with capacity to go in GEO?

No, our company, Orbital Recovery has developed an automated servicing system that could capture the errant spacecraft and move it to the graveyard orbit.

The rendezvous and capture hardware was developed by the German space agency DLR, who's operational methods were proven on the ETS_VII mission in 1998.

We have gone as far as having a signed contract from a marquee customer for our service. We could capture and move that satellite as a short term means of earning extra cash.

It does not matter what Intelsat wants, if we were up there, then their insurance contracts would allow the underwriters to force them to use our service to mitigate their risk in this incident.

Dennis - A servicing spacecraft may not have been able to help with the Galaxy 15 issue. It does not pose any risk of collision at this point. The primary issue is that all the transponders on Galaxy 15 are still operational. Moving it to a graveyard orbit alone is not enough, as it would still cause interference when it went behind any active C-Band satellite. To eliminate the problem you would have to 1) move it to a graveyard orbit and 2) force its solar panels off the sun to get the transponders to turn off. A servicing mission could still do both of these, but it does add a level of complexity.

A servicing mission could still do both of these, but it does add a level of complexity.

In our case it would not. Our system has the ability to point the combined spacecraft mass. We simply grab it and turn it around long enough for the batteries to die and the problem is solved.

There are insurance issues involved and I guarantee you that if the bird is still operational next week you will see a flurry of articles about it interfering with another bird as it goes by. That costs money and I guarantee you a check will probably have to pass between Intelsat and the other company. (or from insurance).