A Future Using Robotic Mechanics
“Scepticism of robotic in-orbit servicing is wasting the space sector vast amounts of money,” said the scientists. “There are few industries which would willingly spend 100 million dollars on highly designed, long-lived hardware without the provision for repair and upgrade,” they added.
European aerospace engineers are working toward the idea of fewer astronauts and more robots used for space maintenance, with anything else considered expensive, wasteful, and considered to be the wrong agenda for the entire space community. Instead, it is advised that space agencies and satellite operators need to improve their efforts to develop higher-technical robotic mechanics for various space “honey-do” jobs: plying various Earth orbits, fixing errant satellites on demand, or repair filing spacecraft.
The three engineers– Alex Ellery, Joerg Kreidsel and Bernd Sommer–offer this scenario in the journal “ACTA ASTRONAUTICA”, discussing the pros and cons of the crewed satellite repair missions using the NASA mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. These particular European space engineers feel that all space agencies and satellite operators, in order to save money and for the safety of the crew, should work with robotics for any maintenance issues in space—and for good reason. Money is a big issue for all countries, but safety issues require an even higher price tag. It is a lot easier and feasible to replace a robot than a member of our human race, one would certainly think.
Back when the Columbus space shuttle was destroyed along with its crew members, NASA managers said that in-orbit repairs were more difficult to perfect than they thought—with the orbital repair capability of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board only one of the 15 primary recommendations. But due to what happened to the Discovery, the lesson has been to always have options from that point on. At that time proven in-orbit repair capabilities were considered a long ways down the road, due to required experiments needed in the weightless space environment.
The Pentagon has already proven such a repair robot, Astro, can be used with in-orbit docking simultaneously docking with NextSat, a prototype serviceable craft which needed its dead battery changed. Agreeing there is a need, researchers are saying that the progress is extremely slow as satellites are not very reliable. Their navigation and thruster failures are commonplace.
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 6:03 am and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
