Ten months ago, NASA asked three companies a question nobody had answered before: can you build and launch a satellite to rescue a $500 million astronomy mission that’s slowly falling out of orbit? And can you do it in under a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, said yes. “They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,'” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s astrophysics division.
The mission target is Swift — a space telescope launched in 2004 that’s been doing groundbreaking work studying gamma-ray bursts for over two decades. Its orbit has been decaying, and without intervention, it would eventually burn up in the atmosphere.
In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small servicing satellite. The plan: Katalyst’s Link spacecraft will chase down Swift in orbit, latch onto it with three robotic arms, and boost it back to a safe operating altitude so it can keep doing science.
Easier said than done. Nobody’s ever done this kind of robotic satellite servicing on a timeline this tight. The Link spacecraft has to autonomously rendezvous with a satellite that was never designed to be caught, grapple it securely, and then fire its engines to raise the orbit — all without damaging a functioning $500 million observatory.
If it works, it could open the door to a whole new model of satellite servicing in space. If it doesn’t, NASA’s out $30 million and Swift is gone.
The launch window is coming up fast. We’ll know soon enough whether this bold gamble pays off.
