Robot refueling of satellites: The demo mission on ISS goes forward this month.
As much as I celebrate this work, conceived and designed by engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center (the same people who ran the missions that maintained the Hubble Space Telescope), I worry that nothing will come of it. The demo mission itself is designed to duplicate exactly the refueling of several climate satellites already in orbit whose lifespans are ending merely because they are running out of fuel. If the ISS demo succeeds, the next natural step would be to plan an actual robotic mission to refuel these satellites.
The worrisome part is that NASA rarely follows through on this kind of research. For example, the agency did tests of an ion engine back in the early 1970s, and it wasn’t until the late 1990s before they finally flew a mission using that technology. Worse, the federal budget situation probably means there is no money to fly such a mission.
Hopefully, some private company will take a look at this engineering, which is all in the public domain, and decide to use it for their own purposes.
MDA (a private company) had plans to do on orbit servicing.
http://is.mdacorporation.com/mdais_canada/Offerings/Offerings_OnOrbitingService.aspx
They even had a deal in the works with Intelsat that fell through.
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/2012/01/20/mda-intelsat-cancel-on-orbit-servicing-deal/
A COTS style pay for performance mission would seem to be a great fit to get on orbit servicing for the climate satellites you mentioned (which ones btw?).
Sorry to be late in responding. The two climate satellites in particular that this robotic demo mission is designed to simulate is Terra and Aqua. Both are in perfect condition, other than a lack of fuel. Neither was designed for refueling, but the demo on ISS duplicates their design exactly. If it succeeds, it will prove that a robot could be sent to fix both of these satellites
A COTS style approach or maybe NASA could sell their work to the private sector, similar to the arrangement with Bigelow, or they could put the tech out there as open source.