The military spends a lot of money on building communication
satellites and sending them into space. Lots of them are still
up there, long after they've failed or become obsolete. Wouldn't
it be neat to recapture and recycle the components, which are
often still working, while also getting rid of all that space
junk? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
thinks so, and it wants to use robots for the job. The Phoenix
program's goal is the development of technologies that can
harvest the components of retired, nonworking geostationary
earth orbit (GEO) communication satellites. Reusing those
components, such as space apertures, solar arrays, and antennas,
would slash the costs of building new ones. It might also speed
their replacement, in the military's effort to maintain 24/7
global communication capability for soldiers on the ground. In
the proposed Phoenix program, robotic arms and end effectors can
decouple an antenna from its retired military communication
satellite and reuse it in a new s