The Astroscale U.S. Refueler (photo by Astroscale)

“Space remains hard,” Ryan Wolff, a program director for Tranche 0 and vendor growth at the Space Development Agency (SDA), said during SATShow Week. “It is a hard place to operate. It’s a hard place to solve your problems, and the logistics chain is the hardest logistics chain you can come up with.”

Wolff spoke on a March 26 panel on orbital servicing and defense architecture alongside three other space industry leaders, who said the needs for in-orbit inspection, repair, and removal will grow rapidly in the next five to 10 years. For SDA to grow its portfolio of contractors in industry, corporate officials called for more demand signals and more flexible funding management.

Clare Martin, executive vice president at orbital servicing company Astroscale, said orbital refueling is a key element in the vision for a space infrastructure layer laid out by U.S. Space Command Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting.

“Refueling is coming very, very soon,” Martin said. “Those are key elements, but they’re not sufficient. There will be a need for inspection services, there will be a need for removal, there’ll be a need for repair. And all of those elements together is what will give you a full logistics infrastructure in space.”

Robert Hauge, president of Northrop Grumman subsidiary SpaceLogistics, sees deorbiting as the most promising capability for Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) servicing. He said with the number of satellites in space growing so large, it could take over a century for these satellites to leave orbit once deactivated.

“There’s a military reason to get those satellites out of that orbit and at least bring them down low enough so that within, say, one year or six months, they’ll come the rest of the way down,” Hauge said.

John Moberly of Trident Solutions, who was chief growth officer at space avionics firm Ibeos prior to its recent acquisition by Trident, expects servicing capabilities to grow impressively over the next five to 10 years. He said a satellite’s ability to dynamically maneuver requires the ability to use propulsion at will, which would deplete quickly and require refueling.

“The way to look at it is that not all missions will require it, just like commercial air flight doesn’t necessarily require aerial refueling,” Moberly said. “But all of our dynamic military operations almost certainly do.”

Wolff said SDA is working with the space industry to grow maturity in orbital servicing, with a focus on deorbit. He pointed to its recent contract with Starfish Space to provide end-of-life disposal for a satellite in LEO, and said SDA is focused on pathfinder deorbit missions to show the space industry that funding exists.

“Our pricing for our systems might be in the $14 million range for a satellite, as opposed to a hundreds of millions of dollar satellite,” Wolff said. “So when we talk servicing, we need the system to match our paradigm. A $100 million support mission for a $14 million satellite doesn’t make logistical sense.”

Martin, Moberly, and Hauge agreed that they want to see a budgetary commitment to invest in orbital servicing.

“In order to move from one-offs, where we are now, into a truly operational infrastructure, that’s the piece that is missing,” Martin said.

“We have the technology to be able to do it,” Hauge added. “We just need that program of record to say ‘We actually want to fund that going forward.’”

Moberly said making funding flexible across portfolios would also expedite space logistics. Getting congressional approval to shift funding across uses is critical, he said.

“You don’t have to start a new program or go palm it for two years out,” Moberly said. “You shift funding, and maybe RDT&E [research, development, testing, and evaluation] funding, but you shift it to operations and maintenance, and you go acquire one of these capabilities and go service it, so it will really speed up.”

Hauge also discussed a possible future need for standardized ports on satellites for servicing.

He said that while some standardization is important, Northrop Grumman is not advocating for a specific port design. If it knows what port a satellite uses, the mission can account for it ahead of time, he said.

“The analogy I use is: if you’ve ever gone into a briefing room, and I’m sure you have many times, you end up finding out that they either have an HDMI, or they have a USB-C, or they have an older USB,” Hauge said. “And you end up asking, ‘Where’s the dongle?’”

He also said Northrop Grumman is flying its passive refueling module, which the Space Force Space Systems Command approved as a possible refueling interface for its programs in 2024, on a new servicing vehicle launching for the first time this summer.

Wolff concluded by saying space is still a small community where the lessons learned from one have heavy applicability to others.

“As high dynamic space ops mature, as services mature, it opens up new paradigms for new mission cases, new enclaves for investment, and new capabilities that weren’t available ten years ago,” Wolff said. “We don’t know what will be available 10 years from now.”

Martin said that to discover new capabilities, it is important to look further ahead and move on from a “throw away” mindset.

“We have the technology now, we just need to actually fold it into the way that we think about space, and stop doing the one-off missions,” she said.