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Astroscale takes the wraps off its $25M orbital refueling craft for Space Force
Orbital operations company Astroscale has revealed new details about its approach to refueling satellites in space, as part of a $25.5 million project
Many satellites are perfectly functional after years in space, but simply lack the fuel to keep safely to their assigned altitude and trajectory, and must be allowed to deorbit instead. You could put up another $100 million satellite — or perhaps, as companies like Astroscale and OrbitFab have proposed, you could spend a tenth of that to do a gas run from the surface to geosynchronous orbit. Some other concepts of space-based refueling opt for the relative simplicity of keeping all the fuel on the craft itself rather than acting as an emergency shuttle between the station and the customer (hence the AAA comparison).
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