Tag Archives: Satellite Servicing

The Canadian Space Agency has released a request for proposals (RFP) that would continue work on robotic manipulators that could eventually be used in future deep space missions, on other planets, the moon and closer to home for satellite servicing and even possibly on commercial space stations.

MDA, which had announced in early May the creation of Space Infrastructure Services (SIS) to handle its nascent satellite servicing business, today announced that Finance Technology Leverage LLC would take a majority stake in SIS and that global satellite communications company SES would be its first customer.

On December 6, 2016 Space Systems Loral (SSL), a subsidiary of MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA), was notified by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center that there had been a data breach of their proprietary data on a NASA server. Orbital ATK was responsible. SSL is now suing them, and publicly, it looks bad for Orbital ATK.

NASA appears to have been spared a major cut to its budget according to the NASA 2018 Fiscal Year (FY) Budget Blueprint. The Trump Administration’s FY2018 budget blueprint would see less than a 1% cut to NASA’s budget and is proposing it be set at $19.1 billion. 

MDA’s U.S. subsidiary, Space Systems Loral (SSL), today entered into an agreement with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop satellite servicing of spacecraft in geostationary orbit (GEO) for the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program.

In December we wrote a story about MDA’s subsidiary Space Systems Loral (SSL) in the U.S. winning a long sought after satellite servicing contract with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Yesterday, the NASA Future In-Space Operations weekly telecon provided an update on the evolution of NASA Goddard’s satellite servicing efforts including the Restore-L Mission which will see SSL build the spacecraft bus.

It seems patience pays off. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) yesterday announced that MDA’s U.S. subsidiary Space Systems Loral (SSL) has won a $127 million contract to develop the Restore-L Spacecraft Bus which will be used to service a government satellite in low earth orbit. According to the NASA press release, SSL “will provide spacecraft bus, critical hardware and services for the development, deployment …