Abstract
The Space Shuttle played an indispensable role in servicing and rescuing satellites and telescopes. This chapter is dedicated to satellite servicing hardware, and concepts such as Orbiters with two robotic arms, space stations dedicated to satellite servicing, and Orbiters modified as propellant refuellers.
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Notes
- 1.
However, California-headquartered SpaceX is preponderantly and successfully challenging such as sorry state of affair. The Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 Heavy rockets are designed with a reusable first stage that upon staging returns to either a barge in the ocean or on a landing pad close to launch site. To date, tens of launches have seen the successful recovery of the first stage and reuse on subsequence flights. Their Dragon and Dragon 2 capsules used for transporting, respectively, supplies and astronauts to the ISS, are reusable and have already been reflown multiple times. Finally, the Starship rocket, the SpaceX is relentlessly developing, promises to be the first ever fully reusable heavy lifter and to slash launch cost to a few hundred dollars per kilogram.
- 2.
Several years later it would become known as the Hubble Space Telescope.
- 3.
In the frictionless environment of space, Newton’s third law of motion is visibly predominant in even the simplest of tasks. Fastening a screw results in the astronaut rotating in the opposite direction unless he has a way of retaining himself and counteract the rotation.
- 4.
Hence the observatory was called Solar Max (maximum).
- 5.
To date, it remains the only such an EVA sortie ever performed.
- 6.
Free-flyers are a class of spacecraft that can best accomplish their mission without the disturbance of human presence. At the same time, they do require periodic servicing and repair that can be better managed by a human crew. A typical example of free-flyer would be a material processing facility, which requires extended periods of extremely low acceleration but regular visits to replenish consumables and raw materials as well as return of the finished products.
- 7.
You can compare the SOC layout with that of the International Space Station in a so-called branched configuration, that offers unrestricted growth, as new branches can always be added.
- 8.
If one recalls the dramatic events that characterized every single satellite servicing mission accomplished by the Space Shuttle, it is easy to appreciate how the presence of astronauts was paramount to the success of those flights. Even today, despite advancements in robotics, the International Space Station would have become inoperative without a crew handling breakdowns.
- 9.
It was feared that the various construction activities undertaken by the SOC would raise the likelihood of debris generation. Hence, hangars would protect the most vulnerable of the apparatus being serviced or stored.
- 10.
This is essential for all those applications where the user can only function properly if fed exclusively with fluid in the liquid phase. A typical example is that of a jet engine.
- 11.
If it is desirable to vent the vapor phase in a low-acceleration environment without venting liquid, PMD can be configured to hold the liquid away from the vent.
- 12.
Liquid hydrogen was selected for the following reasons: receiver tank chilldown and fill is more difficult to accomplish with hydrogen than with liquid oxygen; because of its lower surface tension, low-g liquid acquisition is more difficult; and there are fewer safety problems associated with hydrogen than with oxygen.
- 13.
These were the tanks holding the liquid hydrogen and oxygen to be burned in the fuel cells to produce electricity and water.
- 14.
This cavity is typically referred to as “ullage” and its contents is likewise denominated. Furthermore, any element of the fluid system that is connect to such cavity and allow the transfer of the pressurant are identified with the additional adjective “ullage” (e.g.: ullage return lines, ullage tank).
- 15.
The usual propellants employed for spacecraft attitude control are hydrazine and tetroxide. Apart from being toxic to human health, resupply operations with this type of fluids is inherently difficult and dangerous. It is not surprising then, that refuelling would occur with the astronauts safely inside the Space Shuttle’s crew cabin. For this reason, Rockwell stressed the need to develop as many automated connections as possible to limit to the essential extra vehicular activities.
- 16.
In 1996, NASA renamed it the Chandra-X Ray Observatory in honour of Nobel-prize winner astrophysicist Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar, known for its ground-breaking work in understanding neutron stars and black holes.
- 17.
Dynamic loads such as that of a rocket launch will trigger an oscillatory movement into the body they are applied to. Each body has an infinite number of so-called natural frequencies and natural modes of oscillation. If the launch environment produces a dynamic loading with a frequency close to that of a natural frequency of the payload, a so-called resonance can be triggered which will cause the payload to oscillate feeding in a positive feedback loop on the load being applied. As a result, the payload enters into a resonance in which the amplitude of the oscillation will rapidly increase causing a catastrophic failure. Hence, it is responsibility of the payload designer to produce a structure that is it stiff enough so that the first natural frequency is at a value well above the frequency of the launch environment.
- 18.
In fact, an evaluation of the transfer line length variations performed to determine the range of possible lengths, showed that the length could vary from 5 feet to as much as 30 feet depending on the relative location of the tanker and telescope.
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Sivolella, D. (2022). Unflown On-Orbit Servicing Capabilities. In: The Untold Stories of the Space Shuttle Program. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19653-9_5
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