Crap, Envisat appears to be toast

                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?