Robots in space? A new GAO report says they could change everything — from satellite repairs to space junk

Terry Gerton Well, this is a really interesting report, and it’s not something I think that probably the average person thinks about. So let’s begin at the beginning. Why did GAO go looking at in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing of satellites right now?

Karen Howard  This is an area that is rapidly emerging. I think satellites are technologies that most Americans don’t think about on a day-to-day basis, but yet they contribute so much to our daily lives. Things like weather forecasts and the navigation we use to drive our cars or plan a road trip or, on a larger scale, to control maritime shipping and international transportation, for example, to simple little things like making sure our clocks are on schedule. So, sometimes people think of satellites as very high-tech, very beyond my comprehension types of technologies, but in reality they have a huge impact on our daily life. And what we’re seeing is that historically, satellites were launched and intended to be operational for some period of years before they quit running, and then they just floated around up there as debris. And we’re currently rethinking that model as we get more and more satellites in space. Do we need to think differently about how satellites are launched and operated and whether they can be serviced?

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Terry Gerton Well, your report mentions an incredible number of satellites, over 18,000 now and going up every year. So when you think about this in-space maintenance, what would that require?

Karen Howard Well, we would need satellites, first of all, to have the capability when they’re launched to be docked with. They would need to have some sort of a docking port. They would need to be designed to be refueled or upgraded, whatever the capabilities the satellite operator might be interested in. And then we would to have servicing companies who had the ability to send their own satellites into space with robotic arms and other tools that could latch onto a satellite and perform whatever servicing was needed. Again, whether that’s adding a new fuel supply, putting on a propulsion unit, fixing something that’s broken, maybe something’s gotten jammed or broken. So we’d need both sides of the coin. We need the operators to design their satellites to be capable to be serviced. And then we need servicing providers who are able to provide the services.

Terry Gerton Well, and your report talks about that and you describe a chicken and egg problem. Please expand.

Karen Howard Sure. So, if you think about market supply and demand, the market works best when you have both somebody willing to make a product and somebody willing to buy it. You need both sides of that coin. The same thing is true here. We need satellite operators to be interested in that technology in order to design their satellites for that capability, because that will cost extra money. It will cost more to design a satellite to be refueled, for example, than to design it to be a one-use, disposable kind of a satellite. So they need to see the value, the operator needs to see the value as the customer. And then we need providers who have that capability to go up and service those satellites and who have tested that. The problem is both sides of the coin, in this case, are very risky and very expensive. It costs a lot of money to design satellites to be serviceable. It costs lot of of money to design and test servicing satellites. And both sides are waiting for the other side to make a move.

Terry Gerton As you went through this report, was there anything that surprised you about the priorities of the different sides or any particular challenges that the stakeholders seemed most concerned about?

Karen Howard Few of the things we saw are that chicken and egg problem is made worse by the fact that each customer has different needs. So the Department of Defense, for example, has a number of satellites in orbit. They have certain needs, certain desires. They use a different kind of fuel for their satellites than commercial satellites use, for example. So if we’re talking about refueling satellites, well, the Department of Defense wants that refueling to operate around their kind of fuel. Commercial operators want the refueling to operate around their kind of fuel. So it’s sort of like, you could think of an analogy like designing for gas vehicles and electric vehicles in space. Well, you need different kinds of refuelings stations for those two different kinds of propulsion.

Terry Gerton And I do want to make clear, you alluded to it up front, but we didn’t state it clearly, we’re talking about sending robots into space to repair satellites, not humans. I mean, we’re all used to seeing astronauts in space suits doing space walks to repair something, but that is not what you’re talking about here, you’re talking about space robots.

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Karen Howard That’s correct, and we have not typically had the capability to service satellites unless they were very expensive, very high priority missions like the Hubble Space Telescope or the International Space Station, something where the investment was so high in the tool itself that it was worth the money to launch and send astronauts into space to try to fix it. That’s a very expensive proposition. In this case, the satellites we’re talking about are communication satellites that provide us with cell signals, for example. It’s often much cheaper just to launch new ones than to launch astronauts into space to fix them. But perhaps robotic satellites would be a more cost-effective way to provide some servicing to those lower-expense satellites.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Karen Howard. She’s a director for science, technology assessment, and analytics at the Government Accountability Office. Let’s take up the next section of your report, which really talks about policy proposals. Walk us through what you suggest.

Karen Howard Sure, so we found that some of the challenges could be addressed if policy makers chose to focus attention on a few specific areas. And those include things like more data on the potential to service satellites. In what cases does it make economic sense, for example? Because we’ve always had this disposable, one-use satellite model, we don’t have good economic data or good studies on what it would cost to make satellites serviceable. Agencies that launch satellites typically don’t have a budget line for maintenance. They have budget lines to develop and launch the satellite and then they leave it alone. And all they’re doing is communicating back and forth with it during its lifetime. When it quits, it quits. So they don’t have the budget for maintenance. And so those are some of the things that would need attention. We also would need some attention on standards and what standards might be in play here. So again, thinking about a vehicle that you need to put gasoline in, let’s say. Every vehicle has the same kind of fuel port to put in gasoline, and every gas pump has the nozzle that goes in that fuel port. Somebody, at some point, had to decide that, this is going to be the design we’re going to use, every car needs to use the same kind of fuel entry port, every gas pump needs to the same kind of nozzle, and that’s a standard. We need the same thing in this space to provide some certainty to the manufacturers. What is the docking portal going to look like? How is it gonna be refueled? So some of those technical things that we just don’t think about, they need to be settled in order for this field to advance.

Terry Gerton So that’s a complicated question right off the bat, because there are several different federal agencies who are involved in this space. How would you settle the question of whose standards get primacy?

Karen Howard I think that’s obviously one of the big challenges always with setting standards in any technological field. You have to get all of the players together, talking to each other, and coming to consensus on where do there truly need to be some customized solutions, and there is no one-size-fits-all, and where can everybody come together and agree on a one-size-fits-all that then meets everybody’s needs? And there will be some of both. There will be some customization and there will some standardization, but that just involves a lot of talking, a lot of sharing of interests.

Terry Gerton Are there any of those policy proposals that you think are resonating with particular groups of stakeholders? Is Congress leaning in one way or the other? Is NASA or DoD tending towards one or the other?

Karen Howard I think based on what we heard, there is a range of perspectives on who should be moving first and on which things. So coming back to the chicken and egg problem again, industry would very much like government to start by setting standards and making all of its satellites serviceable. So if DoD, for example, or NASA were to say, every satellite we’re going to build from this day forward is going to have a docking port for refueling, that would provide a market. And that would encourage the providers to invest what they need to invest in getting their capabilities fully up to scale and ready to use in space. The government, of course, says, I don’t need that capability on all of my satellites. I might want it here and there, but I don t need it everywhere yet. The problem is that this technology has the opportunity to be really transformational to the way we operate in space. These big dreams we have about deep space, human exploration of space, or space-based solar energy, some of those kinds of applications, they’re never going to be achieved until we accomplish this in-space servicing model, along with the other two aspects we talk about briefly in our report, in-space assembly and in-space manufacturing.