June 2022
Military space – how worried should we be?
...-use category, for such manoeuvres can also be used harmlessly to capture and tug away derelict satellites to graveyard orbits, as China demonstrated in early 2022 when Shijian 21 removed an old Beidou navigation satellite. By the 1980s, though, the...
April 2024
Unlocking the NewSpace economy through space-based solar power
...that satellite design can be revolutionised: not design for de-orbit, but design for maintenance, for upgrades, providing the ...broken components or even whole SPS infrastructure in graveyard orbits will not be sustainable. There is an imperative to ...
April 2021
Space wars - how they start and how to end them
... author’s own state-change threat-detection algorithms have seen satellites enter into geosynchronous graveyard orbits and ‘play dead’, while their orbital elements actually improve with time, showing that they are still controlled and...
September 2021
Developing an in-orbit servicing and manufacturing economy
... transportation services following deployment from a launch vehicle. This can include the movement of GEO satellites to a graveyard orbit, or bringing them into use, as well as moving healthy LEO satellites from a poor deployment position to a useful...
