Cool space story today - hoping an IBB resident rocket scientist can help me understand how this could work. As I understand it, an orbiting craft's speed is determined by its weight and altitude. For example, if you want a 10kg satellite to orbit at 400km altitude it has to go 7860 kmh. Any slower and it will fall into atmosphere and burn up, any faster and it will fling off into space. So how are they going to be able to match speed to refuel when the 2 craft don't weigh the same?
Orbit Fab wants to build a network of gas stations in space.
techcrunch.com
Orbit Fab unveils $30K port to refuel satellites
Aria Alamalhodaei@breadfrom / 11:34 AM PDT•March 29, 2024
Image Credits: Orbit Fab(opens in a new window)
Orbit Fab wants to build “gas stations” for satellites — which means it needs the gas cap, a mechanism for transferring propellant from an orbital tanker to the customer spacecraft. That docking mechanism, called RAFTI, is now flight-qualified and on the market. The price tag for each port? Just $30,000.
The Colorado-based startup (and former
TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist) has been in operation since 2018, and its CEO and co-founder Daniel Faber has been working in the space industry for decades; he’s likely best known for heading up Deep Space Industries (DSI), a company that was targeting asteroid mining. The company, which was founded in 2012, was acquired by Bradford Space seven years later.
“If you want [to talk about] something that’s too early, that’s it,” he joked during a recent interview. As part of the company’s efforts to eventually build tech capable of prospecting a distant asteroid, DSI built satellite thrusters for orbital maneuvering. This work, and subsequent conversations with customers and colleagues, eventually led Faber to believe that the next big opportunity was in-space refueling.
Part of it is simple math: Colleagues and former customers told him that they could squeeze as much as $1 million in marginal revenue from satellite missions from an extra kilogram of propellant