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Posted on 06/23/2026 7:51:46 PM PDT by Red Badger
Satellites don't always stay in orbit. As they get closer to Earth, atmospheric drag can pull them lower and lower until they burn up, with solar activity speeding up the process.
NASA's Swift Space Observatory is facing that fate -- its orbit is decaying, and if left alone, it will be destroyed in a matter of months.
But in a first-of-its-kind mission, Katalyst Space, a startup, is teaming up with NASA to try and rescue Swift using the company's newly developed robotic spacecraft, LINK.
"This is a historic mission, you know, some would call it the first of its kind, a robotic spacecraft that can go and capture an unprepared satellite," said Robert Lamontagne, vice president of strategic partnerships at Katalyst Space.
Swift's original orbit was around 370 miles above the Earth's surface. But over the years, it's fallen to less than 250 miles, according to NASA. Now it's a race against the clock to keep Swift from falling even further and burning up in Earth's atmosphere.
To save the satellite before time runs out, the Arizona-based company built its 935-pound rescue spacecraft in just 250 days. LINK was designed to physically interact with Swift despite the observatory not being designed for this kind of operation.
"Over the last nine months, we have gone from a clean sheet to a spacecraft that is currently integrated on a rocket, on an airplane ready to go to college for launch," added Kieran Wilson, the principal investigator for LINK at Katalyst Space. "This is an absolutely unprecedented development timeline for this program."
If all goes as planned, LINK will be launched into space on Saturday aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, which will be launched from a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar carrier aircraft taking off from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific.
Once in orbit, it will take about three weeks for LINK to rendezvous with and capture the 22-year-old observatory. Over two to three months, the spacecraft will use its thrusters to raise Swift into a more stable orbit. The two will then separate as LINK lowers itself back into Earth's atmosphere, where it will burn up, keeping it from adding to the rest of the space debris in our orbit.
The hope is that the maneuver will add 10 years to the mission and allow NASA to resume its scientific operations. The space agency had to stop most of the observatory's scientific operations to reduce drag and slow its descent from orbit.
"No one thought it was going to be possible," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, NASA's division director for astrophysics. "No one thought we would get as far as we've already gotten today."
The clock is ticking for the $30 million mission to be completed. According to NASA, Swift is currently falling at roughly eight kilometers per month, and the space agency estimates it will drop below 300 kilometers sometime around October.
According to Wilson, at that point, the satellite will be "too low" for the rescue mission to be executed.
A potential blueprint for saving satellites Earth's orbit is littered with lots of aging satellites. If the mission is successful, NASA and Katalyst hope it could help establish a blueprint for future satellite rescues so fewer spacecraft are abandoned. Katalyst envisions having a fleet of spacecraft that can repair, refuel and upgrade satellites in need of help.
"Katalyst is here really to kind of mark the end of that throwaway model and the start of a new model where we think the spacecraft operators should no longer be constrained by the silly decisions that were made before launch," Lamontagne said.
There's no guarantee the rescue will be successful. Swift wasn't designed to be grabbed by another spacecraft, and its age could make it vulnerable to damage during the capture.
"We still have to get spacecraft on orbit. We have to operate the spacecraft there successfully. And as we've all seen before, that's a very challenging thing to do," said Wilson.
"Rendezvous is going to be a challenge. It's always a technical challenge, but we think we're ready to handle that," he added.
NASA says space weather and how the Earth's atmosphere interacts with the spacecraft could also impact the outcome.
"If my confidence proves true and this team pulls off everything perfectly, the darn sun puffing up the darn atmosphere, at the wrong time," Domagal-Goldman said. "There are still unknowns, both in terms of the dynamic nature of this part of Earth's atmosphere, and its response to solar activity that is beyond all of our control."
The Swift Space Observatory is a NASA satellite built to study gamma-ray bursts, the brightest and most powerful explosions in the universe. Swift uses multiple instruments, including three multiwavelength telescopes that can collect data in visible, ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma-ray light. NASA has used it to study black holes, stars, comets and other celestial objects.
"Swift can routinely conduct follow-up with things that go bump in the night within minutes. It really is NASA's first responder," said Brad Cenko, Swift's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Launched in 2004, the observatory was supposed to last only two years. But it's been operating for more than two decades.
"Last year, Swift received five requests from the community to follow up newly discovered sources each and every day. That's more annual community requests than any other NASA facility," Cenko added.
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SWIFT PING!..............[Not her]..................
I can remember when Skylab and Mir came down.
I saw Skylab on one of it’s last orbits over Ft. Lauderdale where I lived at the time.............
Lets hope this can be something done regularly.
(I have wondered if going forward they should just build satellites that have thrusters with the ability to refuel, a refueling port, or to accept a fuel pod while in orbit? That and providing a surface for a refueling vehicle grapple or latch onto.)
Gee if only NASA had something manned that could go into orbit; rescue or repair satellites; then return to earth: Maybe call it a space shuttle...
Bastiches never acted on actually building & deploying the supposedly planned successor craft to the original shuttle fleet.
(The Swift Space Observatory)
If we send her music 🎶🎶 into Outer Space 🌌🌌🌌
them Space Aliens 👽👽👽 gonna attack us fer sure
😲😱🤯🤯🤯
Now this is an excellent example of useful, applied science and engineering.
Wow, I didn’t know Taylor Swift had her own orbital telescope.
She’s a double billionaire now!........
Maybe she will write a song about it................
>
Gee if only NASA had something manned that could go into orbit; rescue or repair satellites; then return to earth: Maybe call it a space shuttle...>
They’ll get right on it after they finish the Muslim outreach assignment.
EC
My job was to write FORTRAN to analyze data send down from Skylab. Good times.
One day, maybe already happened, someone will write a program that translates all known computer languages to a universal language or to any other language. FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, C, UNIX, whatever to whatever.....................
Similar things are currently done. My son was part of a team that holds the current Guinness record for maneuvering satellites in close formation. He’s an astronautical engineer and specializes in close formation satellite operations.
He’s flown closer than the current record but if this mission is successful, I assume Guinness will re-evaluate the record.
The first company (maybe SpaceX) that can begin to clean up the orbitals around the earth is going to make mucho dinero.
In that case, why doesn’t she have orbital binoculars?
The obvious place to grab a bird is it’s engine bell of the apogee kick motor if it has such a motor attached too it. The engine is already structurally stressed for delta V in its primary thrust direction. You can insert a probe up the center and inflate a ball like bladder inside to lock the probe to the engine from the inside then you have push and pull delta V plus attitude control as the engine is fixed rigidly to the main body by default. Pretty much every GEO bird has a apogee kick motor used to go from GTO to it’s GEO slot takes about 1800 M/S delta V so it’s not a small rocket engine at all.
LEO birds might have their own circularization motor or it could have been inserted by a second or third stage that then dropped away and deorbited like SpaceX does with its second stages or the Russians do with Fregat & Soyuz if that’s the case there should still be a docking ring where the stage was attached in the first place that’s where your grab points are going to be you design a compatible grabber ring with finger like grabbers on the rim to mate male to male or female to male depending on what part was left attached to your target bird. AI Stereoscopic 3D 8K cams , laser LIDAR, and gyros should do the link up all by itself. Space robots humping in orbit 😂
“Maybe call it a space shuttle...>”
Lol no
The space shuttle was a giant congressional pork boondoggle that was pure corporate welfare for the state’s and aerospace labours, lobbyists and corps. The fact that it flee was completely secondary to that primary mission of sweet sweet pork barrel moneys. The fact that it killed people on a regular basis and lost nearly half its fleet to crashes also doesn’t bode well for it.
Private industry aka SpaceX is already on this. Starship IS the fully reusable vehicle you seek it has 10X the payload and is made of steel not carbon fiber so ice doesn’t kill you when it puts a hole in your wing leading edge. Looking at you Columbia.
Starship will bring up 150 tonnes and land upwards of 50 it has the thrust to land a full 150 and hover with it using its 3 raptor sea level engines at full blast they won’t as the fuel penalty would be huge. Starship is how humans dominate the near earth solar system, the moon, asteroid belt and Mars.
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