Novel robotic satellite servicing is now available after 20+ years of development

[00:00:00]and liftoff. Go Falcon, go MRB, and go MEP.

[00:00:08]>> A Falcon 9 rocket soared into the sky over Florida's space coast. On board the 70 m tall rocket, spacecraft that combined decades of effort from dozens of people across North Grumman, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, NASA, and the US Naval Research Laboratory. Oh, we are so excited.

[00:00:29]>> That includes Bernie Kelm, the acting director of the Naval Center for Space Technology within the NRL. Spaceflight Now spoke exclusively with him in the leadup to launch on July 21st.

[00:00:41]>> So, at the US Naval Research Lab, our job is to look to the future and to see where the art of the possible will bring benefits to national security space and our national space capabilities. And I can remember when we were most commonly told, "This is crazy. This is not how space works. what are we doing in this area and would attack the technology problems and uh mature them and prove them out and show that we know how to do this and with DARPA funding funding us at NRL and we had a team that just kept working and working and going through the hard problems and got it to the point that the technology is mature and ready to go.

[00:01:17]>> That technology is the heart of the spacecraft called the mission robotic vehicle or MRV for short. It's a public private partnership and features the main payload, a pair of robotic arms dubbed the robotic servicing of geocynchronous satellites, RSGs for short.

[00:01:35]>> In a robotic sense, we count a degree of freedom as a as a joint that can make one direction of motion. So, the human arm actually has seven degrees of freedom. If you count them like a roboticist, you might think shoulder uh elbow wrist. You know, your elbow, if you're healthy, only goes one direction.

[00:01:57]Your wrist will have three and your shoulder will have three.

[00:02:00]>> If you have a robot arm with six degrees of freedom, you could position your tool, so in my case, my hand, anywhere in your workspace with the attitude you want, you with some limitations. When you have that extra degree of freedom, I have multiple solutions that will get my hand to this. So I could move my elbow to different positions so that if there's an obstacle like a thruster right where the one solution happened to be, I have more solutions so that we can work on satellites that we did not conceive at the time we developed this mission. We don't know what our future customers are going to be. We don't know where all the obstacles are. So having a seven degree of freedom robot arm gives us a flexibility to go to customers that we didn't anticipate. Having two robot arms lets us rendevu and dock with one and then do dextra servicing opportunities with the other.

[00:02:49]>> The concept for a purely robotic servicing solution goes back to the early 1990s when folks at the Naval Research Lab began kicking around the concept. Kelm says over the more than two decades that he's been involved with this work, there have been plenty of naysayers.

[00:03:05]>> Oh, we had many. We had that the moment we go and touch another satellite, it's going to float away. And so we built up a zeroravity test environment in two dimensions and rotation and we proved it out and that we can't carry enough compute power that you know our spaceflight computers are much slower than what we have on earth. We have to survive the radiation environment for a very long time. So we proved that we could do this on computers that we could fly and that we could run the machine vision algorithms and the robotics control algorithms and everything and make it work together. Uh, we had a myth for a while that there would be as soon as we got close to another satellite, there would be a lightning bolt to discharge and we'd both die. And at NRL, we have a plasma physics chamber. And we simulated the environment we would have at GEIO. And we found the worst case and we found that we know how to engineer a solution that will make it work. And so we just taken all of these problems working with DARPA engineering solutions and getting this ready. The way that the MRV works is it approaches a customer satellite and is then able to use one of the robotic arms to grapple onto it and then use the other arm to either attach a mission extension pod, an MEP, to provide additional fuel and propulsion or perform other servicing as needed.

[00:04:21]One of the more unique locations where early testing of this technology occurred included overnight work at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. One of the things that we had never really quite known was how our relative navigation spaceflight cameras and spaceflight sensors would work against a very large, very fine mesh reflector. Some of these reflectors that spacecraft use as part of their antennas are almost invisible to the eye. They're such thin wires.

[00:04:51]We're like, how would we see them? And so I contacted the Smithsonian. I said, can we borrow some of your models and bring them to NRL? They said, "No, we can't do that." And I said, "Can I bring a scientific C team out and a couple million dollars of spaceflight hardware to the Smithsonian?" Like, "We would love that." And the Smithsonian team could not have been better. That we worked 5:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. for two consecutive nights setting up approaches and flyarounds around the Tedras model they had that was hanging directly over space shuttle.

[00:05:23]>> And saw, we learned a lot. And then after that we came back and we built a scale model in our lab and said all right now what if the satellite is in motion and there's relative motion between and then we use the scale model to fill in data that we couldn't collect at the Smithsonian. But that was a team of about 20 and everybody had a grand time for for two two backto-back nights.

[00:05:44]Some of the other early critical groundwork towards this mission was laid by Northwork Grumman with the launches of their mission extension vehicles one and two in 2019 and 2020 respectively.

[00:05:55]Dr. James Shoemaker, the program manager for DARPA's tactical technology office says this was one of the major milestones that made the MRV and EP mission launch possible. Northrup and Space Logistics actually creating their own commercial sersing industry because it sort of it sort of proved that you could actually dock with an unprepared satellite on orbit and not break it. And so there's always a lot of concern with the clients on can you actually do this safely and they've like in taking the the safety issue off the table was a big milestone that they did on their own and now they're extending it with RSG as an MRV. But as the technology questions got knocked down, there was still the matter of creating a business case for this type of service. Alongside the NRL and DARPA in studying the marketability of this type of robotic servicing was NASA.

[00:06:47]>> When you work in a field like this, you struggle to understand why it isn't obvious to everyone else that we need to have this in space. But we do have this kind of cultural tendency to just do things the way we always have. And the way we've always done things in space was once you launch them, you never see or touch them again. And of course, they all have to fit into a single launch fairing, right? So imagine if we did everything on Earth that way where anything you built had to fit in the shipping container. You couldn't have two shipping containers. And then anything that you deployed also had to be, you know, perfect out of the box with no opportunity for for repair. Uh, and so like when I think to me when you phrase it that way, it's obvious that this is why are we not doing this in space? It's the only place we aren't.

[00:07:31]Um, so yeah, I hope we'd be here 10 years ago.

[00:07:34]>> Um, it's been a it's been a long struggle and part of it's a technical struggle, but a lot of it also is a cultural struggle to convince the world that this is, you know, feasible, viable, actually beneficial to do work this way. say in the 20 years I've been working on this and to doing technology development the business case problem is just as hard as the rocket science and with Northr Grumman I'm thrilled that they found a solution where with their mission extension pods that are the MRV RSGS will install they have something that they can schedule they will know when people need more propulsion and so that's a schedulable um business case and they can make plans a lot of the other really high value of the mission is anomaly resolution.

[00:08:20]>> We never know when there's going to be the next anomaly in space, but when there is, we could potentially be saving billions of dollars of spacecraft uh with this mission.

[00:08:31]>> The MRV and MEPs sitting inside this payload fairing ahead of launch already have their destination set. They will service satellites from Luxembourgbased SCES and Australia based Optus as well as customers who weren't publicly disclosed as of publication as to where things go from here.

[00:08:51]>> From DARPA's perspective, actually probably we're probably pretty much done. I mean, it's the end of the road for guys.

[00:08:57]>> It's the end of the road. You know, we do we our job is to prevent technology surprise, take the technical risk off the table. Once we prove it can be done and transition it to someone else then uh we have to move on to something new and you can see even in uh there's a fair number of other commercial companies starting to get interest in servicing and do and working on it on their own. So the there's less need for DARPA to invest in it to keep the technology going.

[00:09:24]>> As for future applications, NASA's Bo N says the MRV technology opens up new possibilities for satellites in geocynchronous space. If you're building very big satellites, you have some competition. Um, this is maybe a way to add flexibility and and upgrade upgradability to make it more competitive. And I think that's absolutely true here. Um, you know, I think uh the payload is a, you know, a third at most of the mass of a spacecraft. And so if you want to put a new payload in space, you don't have to launch a whole spacecraft. You just have to launch a payload and install it on an existing platform. Um and and I I think I think there's a lot of um capability there that that makes bigger spacecraft much more competitive than they used to be.

[00:10:08]>> And regarding the MRV MEP mission itself, it'll take about a year for it to reach GEO and begin its servicing journey. The MRV has a 10-year mission out ahead of it, and only part of it is relatively set in stone. Kelm says this could be the potential for a new future in geocynchronous earth orbit and elsewhere.

[00:10:29]>> I hope we see this as a real inflection point in how we do space. You know, we the team DARPA NRL North of Grumman with our support from NASA are servicing clients that aren't designed to be serviced because that's what's up there.

[00:10:41]Now, as users and customers of space get more comfortable with satellite servicing and we see this as a routine, reliable capability. If we have future satellites designed to be serviced, the level of services and level of capabilities will just become exponentially greater. Look at the USB port on the computer and how many more things that is doing than anybody ever figured was what it would be intended for. If we have USB ports in space, we can uh much more easily install batteries, sensors, computers, all types of upgrades as satellites start to be designed so that servicing can come in and help them out. Reporting for spaceflight now, I'm Robinson Smith.