Economics of satellite refurbishment

[francesco nicoli]

concept: a third party company purchases a BA330 and a flight on a F-H (with adjusted fairing).

it purchases GEO satellites at their end of life from their owners, or -after the satellite's formal decommissioning - gets paid by a government for clean-up.

The BA330 hosts two workers charged with assembly/disassembly.
When enough customers for the birds are found, a F-9 tanker version is sent up.

it sounds sustainable as it requires some upfront investment but limited technological development and reduced personnel expenditure (in the tens rather than hundreds).
opinions?

comments?

[Jim]

How are two people in zero g going to disassemble spacecraft built in one g at 1 standard atm?  How are two people going to deal with hazardous propellants and high pressure gases?
What are they going to assemble them into?
And what is the tanker for?

[Bob Shaw]

And, where would the BA330 be? LEO isn't GEO, and one way or another a *lot* of delta V is going to be involved.

A better idea might be to use unmanned SEP vehicles to slowly 'harvest' defunct GEO vehicles into a nice, controlled spiderweb of dead spacecraft, ready to be recycled/vented/etc robotically. People? Keep them away.

[the_other_Doug]

And, where would the BA330 be? LEO isn't GEO, and one way or another a *lot* of delta V is going to be involved.

A better idea might be to use unmanned SEP vehicles to slowly 'harvest' defunct GEO vehicles into a nice, controlled spiderweb of dead spacecraft, ready to be recycled/vented/etc robotically. People? Keep them away.

Exactly.  And a fleet of robotic "harvesters" could be deployed into a variety of orbital planes, so none of them would have to change their planes by very much.  Plane changes in LEO are incredibly delta-V intensive.

You'd likely need to have hundreds of crewed outposts to do this "by hand", and that means that, to rendezvous with their various targets, they would have to move big masses around.  The most minimal of crewed outposts would have to include all the support equipment and consumables that people require.  And, of course, you would need to send a huge number of logistics vehicles up constantly to resupply them.  Yeah, at an optimal rate of three to four a year -- per outpost.  With even 50 outposts, that's 150 to 200 logistics launches a year.

All of which have the potential of leaving their own debris, or being struck by MMOD and adding their share to a potential cascade.

Sounds like the cure could possibly be worse than the disease...

[Steven Pietrobon]

Plane changes in LEO are incredibly delta-V intensive.

With a single burn yes. With three burns (burn at LEO for high apogee, change plane at apogee, burn at LEO to reduce apogee) its a lot less. For example, for a single burn 90° plane change at LEO, the delta V is sqrt(2)*7.8 = 11.0 km/s. With three burns (say going to infinity to simplify the calculation) we get 2*(11.2-7.8) = 6.8 km/s. With a lower apogee and some inclination changes for all three burns, this can probably be reduced. Still a very high penalty though.