The
successful European environmental Earth observation satellite Envisat suddenly
went silent on April 8, and thus far attempts to get it to respond to the
“please wake up” entreaties from the ground have engendered no answer. Now, satellite engineers have managed
remarkable recoveries of impaired satellites when they get telemetry indicating
what is going wrong, but when they ain’t getting’ nuttin’, there isn’t much
they can do. Which makes me wonder –
again –if there wouldn’t be a viable business opportunity for manned satellite
repair missions. We proved it was
possible to do with both the SolarMax satellite and the optically-challenged
Hubble (and even for that matter Skylab) – there are such considerations as
having to be able to get a ship above low-Earth orbit into the orbits where a
lot of these satellites reside (and of course geostationary satellites are a
whole lot higher) – but still, considering the multi-million dollar investments
that go into the instruments on these satellites, wouldn’t it make sense to be
able to fix them for a few more millions, rather than have to build new ones
that cost a lot more? We also need a
reliable human-rated launch system, and a better spaceship in terms of
maneuverability and flexibility than Soyuz, but hey, if you want astronauts to
have something to do, what could be better than fixing broken satellites?
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