“Telespazio intends to play a key role in the future in-orbit servicing market, providing customers seeking satellite relocation, refueling, repair or removal with the necessary space and ground-based capabilities.
“There is an industrial role that Telespazio can definitely play on the basis of 61 years of experience in providing operational service,” Marco Brancati, Telespazio head of innovation and technical governance, told SpaceNews. “On the other side, Telespazio can be a kind of broker, combining the needs of the owners of in-orbit assets with the availability of tugs able to provide specific services.”
For now, Telespazio can assist satellite operators with orbit-raising, repositioning, station-keeping and deorbit. Over the longer term, the joint venture between Leonardo and Thales, intends to provide services for spacecraft designed for in-orbit repair, refueling, assembly or deorbit.
“One possibility for the future is to perform refueling in orbit or to replace some unit of the satellite that has been broken,” Brancati said. “In that case, you need the availability of a tug with an automatic arm that is able to replace units on the satellite that needs such service and satellites assembled in a way that someone can replace units.”
Telespazio will draw on the company’s experience as it establishes its satellite-servicing business.
In terms of orbit-raising, Telespazio assisted the European Space Agency in moving the Advanced Relay and Technology Mission satellite to its intended orbit in 2003. After the satellite, called Artemis, was injected into the wrong orbit due to a launch failure, Telespazio helped salvage the mission by firing the onboard electric thrusters to raise its orbit.
Telespazio has experience deorbiting satellites as well.”
Comment: I have been wondering as to who would rise up to handle the myriad implied tasks in the existence of such creations as the Webb telescope that will eventually need to be re-fueled or have other maintenance tasks performed. pl
Telespazio to play key role in satellite servicing market – SpaceNews
Found it at last. “Tee Vee Man” by Hargreaves. – I read this circa 1964 – I was 14. Published in “Lambda 1 and other stories” edited by John Carnell. Telsat, the first commercial communication satellite, had been launched the previous year.
Baldwin would have worked for Telespasio.
“ Tee Vee Man
Premise:
William E. Baldwin is a Canadian TV repairman aboard an international scientific research space station. Oh, he doesn’t work on the TV set in the lounge, though he can. His job is to repair TV transmission satellites whenever they go on the blink. Trouble is, everyone else on the station is a certified egghead scientist. They think William is a waste of space. They resent talking to him. They even resent giving him orders.
William sets off on his “Bronco” to match polar orbit with a malfunctioning satellite. Nobody bothers telling him that if he doesn’t get gizmo running properly within a certain time a newly independent African nation will go without television. Not a question of missing soap operas. Said government badly needs to transmit live footage of their glorious leader. Thousands of lives are at stake including, unexpectedly, William’s. Repairing a satellite in Outer Space not as easy as it sounds.”
As far as I know, the downlink for the European Space Agency is on Mt. Troodos, Cyprus, controlled by the remote signals station that is called RAF Troodos. Cyprus is a very important western intelligence asset, particularly that part of it that is by treaty acknowledged to be a British Sovereign Base Area. This would include GCHQ Cyprus, which is connected to the Ayios Nikolaos station and, as far as I know, sends important data to GCHQ Bude, at Morwenstow, Cornwall, by antenna but also by undersea telecommunication cables. The seas around Cyprus have important telecom hubs. In Alexandria, Egypt, there is also an internet hub in a building on a quiet back street that is one of the most important information infrastructure locations in the world. I assume that Telespazio is closely connected to the ESA.
I also assume that Telespazio could be part of the more than one hundred companies that do business with SvalStat at Spitzbergen, the antenna farm on the top of the world.
If something happens to the undersea telecoms off of Svalbard, Cyprus, or Egypt, I assume that Telespazio would be knocked offline until such point as the fiber optic cables were repaired or replaced. That would only be a small aspect of the crisis.
Karl Frederick Rauscher, now head of the GIIC, an internet policy group, at one of the first but now quite frequent cybersecurity conferences held in 2010 in London, presented an important paper that said: “It is unclear if civilization can recover from the failure of a technology that has been so rapidly adopted without a backup plan… Without (the network) the world’s economic-financial market would immediately freeze…The impact of such a failure on international security and economic stability could be devastating… There is no sufficient alternative backup in the case of catastrophic loss of regional or global connectivity. ”
Or, to put it as Rishi Sunak, then a British MP stated in another important, dire, and extremely surprising, parliamentary study: the internet is ‘an existential threat’ to the west.
The problem is not in the stars.
.
Actually, it’s called SvalSat.
The Webb telescope is interesting, some people say it is fake, if it lasts 2 years without a malfunction I would say no, it was just massively expensive due to fraud. I hope it is. The answer to your question is probably no one, it should really be the tax payer but I doubt that. If you look at its pics, well to be honest they are not that good.
It is out of date tech now, so why bother when we can do better near earth. Shame really but still it’s there, so if not fake, better than nothing.