Back in October, we posted about a program DARPA has been working on to rip apart dead satellites and harvest their organs to make new(er) satellites. It seemed more than a little crazy, but the program is now moving forward, with DARPA holding industry conferences and putting down millions of dollars on the idea.
Recycling dead satellites makes a huge amount of sense. By some estimates, there’s a third of a trillion dollars worth of sophisticated hardware in geosynchronous orbit above the Earth that’s no longer functional. Most of the time, what no longer functional means is that some critical component of a satellite has failed, and since that component can’t be fixed, the rest of the satellite is effectively scrap. For example, a satellite might have a software failure in its communications system, rendering it completely useless even if all of the instruments are 100% operational. This isn’t just an expensive waste of development time and hardware, it’s also a waste of all of the resources that went into getting the thing into orbit in the first place.
via DVICE
Image: DARPA
