Advancing Technologies for In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing

In 2023, NASA announced the creation of a Consortium for Space Mobility and ISAM Capabilities (COSMIC) — a new organization devoted to advancing technologies for in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing (ISAM). COSMIC will foster a collaborative ecosystem that harnesses the nation’s collective brainpower, resources, and technologies to accelerate the wider adoption of ISAM and usher in a new era of advanced space operations.

Greg Richardson leads COSMIC as the Executive Director of the consortium and primary interface to NASA. He is also a principal engineer/scientist in the Human Exploration and Space-flight Division at The Aerospace Corporation (Aerospace).

Richardson is currently leading several Aerospace efforts in evolvable structure and ecosystems in space (ESES); in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing (ISAM); space access, mobility, and logistics (SAML); and rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO). He also provides support to multiple government customers on in-space servicing, RPO, cluster flight, spacecraft autonomy, and design of advanced mission concepts.

In this interview, Richardson elaborates on the future vision of COSMIC and how the organization will coordinate work across government, industry, research, and academic entities, to help accelerate ISAM activities that will foster the future space economy.

Tech Briefs: What was the need for NASA to create COSMIC and what is its primary goal?

Greg Richardson: The ISAM National Strategy and National ISAM Implementation Plan released by the White House in 2022 signaled a mandate to establish U.S. leadership in this critical area. To achieve this, these documents underscored a need for a national consortium to improve communication between the various stakeholders working on ISAM. The Implementation Plan tasked NASA with building this consortium, and NASA embraced the national imperative.

COSMIC’s mission is to make ISAM a routine part of space architectures and mission lifecycles. COSMIC is funded by NASA and is managed by Aerospace, but it serves stakeholders from all sectors of the U.S. ISAM community — government, industry, academia, non-profit research, and others — and is responsive to their needs. COSMIC creates avenues for members to communicate and coordinate on ISAM, establish areas of common interest, and identify gaps to close. Together, the COSMIC member community envisions a future in which the U.S. provides global leadership in ISAM.

Tech Briefs: What are COSMIC’s key focus areas?

Richardson: ISAM is not just a technology problem, but rather an approach to mission design that requires integrated systems thinking. I worked on DARPA’s Orbital Express mission, which launched in 2007 and successfully demonstrated autonomous rendezvous and docking, in-space refueling, and hardware transfer between satellites using a dexterous robotic arm.

This mission was a proof of concept for both the technology and mission operations associated with satellite servicing.

Today, clients want to better understand the current ISAM state of play — including operational ISAM capabilities, cost, and risk — to make informed decisions about using ISAM. To meet these needs, COSMIC is organized around five focus areas:

1. Research and Technology (RT) identifies the “tech push” needed to expand the scope and scale of ISAM missions that will be possible in the future.
2. Missions and Ecosystems (ME) identifies and aggregates the “mission pull” of missions, clients, or space systems that would be enabled or enhanced by including ISAM in their program lifecycle.
3. Demonstration Infrastructure (DI) focuses on digital, ground-based, and space-based testbeds needed to turn ISAM technologies into operational capabilities.
4. Policy and Regulation (PR) identifies challenges that ISAM missions face due to regulations originally designed for much more static spacecraft.
5. Workforce Development (WD) helps the next generation of engineers, satellite operators, researchers, acquisition professionals, insurers, and mission designers better understand ISAM’s unique challenges and opportunities.

Tech Briefs: Why do we need to advance ISAM research and development?

Richardson: Proposed ISAM capabilities may enable new missions, extend spacecraft lifetimes, reduce deployment costs and timeframes, and enhance survivability and resilience. People often imagine this requires far-off technologies, but that’s not the case. ISAM techniques have already been demonstrated to repair the Hubble Space Telescope and to assemble and maintain the International Space Station using crew EVAs. Missions like DARPA’s Orbital Express and NASA’s Robotic Refueling Mission demonstrated the capability to perform similar activities robotically. Northrop Grumman Space Logistics’ Mission Extension Vehicles demonstrated the ability to perform rendezvous, docking, and life extension on client satellites that were not designed for servicing.

ISAM is mature enough to be used today, on today’s client satellites. Continued on-orbit demonstrations can show skeptical clients that ISAM operations can be a routine, safe, and effective method for improving and expanding the performance, availability, resilience, scientific output, and lifetime of space systems. Further investments in R&D will expand the scope of what robotic ISAM missions can do, enabling more complex operations in the future.

Tech Briefs: What are the biggest challenges the space industry faces in building ISAM capabilities?

Richardson: The biggest barriers to widespread, routine adoption of ISAM are knowledge and awareness of current ISAM capabilities, and the economics of ISAM. Through COSMIC, we are addressing the former by creating inventories of past, present, and planned activities from industry, academia, and government, and making these available to all COSMIC members. They will benefit from the knowledge base of previous missions which demonstrated the core capabilities needed for safe and reliable RPO and docking, the manipulation of objects using dexterous robotic arms and end effectors, fluid transfer between satellites made by different vendors, and even in-space assembly of modules sent up from the ground.

COSMIC is addressing the economics of ISAM through aggregation of demand signals from multiple users, mapping future mission needs to existing capabilities, and reducing the duplication that comes when activities from multiple agencies or companies remain in disparate information silos. COSMIC’s three member caucuses provide space for this information transfer to occur fluidly within and between government, industry, and academic circles.

Tech Briefs: Which are the enabling technologies that will play a key role in ISAM missions?

Richardson: All spacecraft — including those performing ISAM operations — need power, propulsion, attitude control, communications, and thermal control. Servicing spacecraft will typically carry specialized payloads like sensors for relative navigation, robotic arms for capturing or manipulating the client spacecraft, couplings that allow fluid transfer between spacecraft, and sufficiently accurate propulsion and processing to enable safe and reliable RPO. While all of these technologies have been demonstrated in space before, integrating them into a single mission and demonstrating they work reliably is an engineering challenge that many companies are working to solve.

Given how many companies are engaged, interoperability and standards are critically important. Costs cannot be low enough for a business case to close if there are separate set of interfaces for European, Japanese, and American client satellites. Coordination of standards allows for servicing spacecraft built by any company can interact with client spacecraft built by others. This ensures the resulting market for ISAM services is as broad as possible and can be filled by competitors within a broader ISAM ecosystem.

Tech Briefs: How important will be efforts of commercial space companies in ISAM capability development?

Richardson: Commercial space companies are drivers for innovation in ISAM and key players in the ISAM National Strategy for the U.S. to establish global leadership in this area. Northrop Grumman SpaceLogistics launched two Mission Extension Vehicles (MEVs) to geostationary orbit and are providing life extension services to two Intelsat clients. MEV operations are paving the way for SpaceLogistics’ follow-on vehicle, built through a public-private partnership with DARPA, called the Mission Robotic Vehicle. Astroscale’s ADRAS-J mission recently released the first image of space debris captured through rendezvous and proximity operations.

Companies like Starfish Space, ThinkOrbital, Orbit Fab, Quantum Space, and many others are pioneering new technologies to support servicing, assembly, or manufacturing missions for national security, civil, and international space customers, and even fellow commercial space companies. Many of these companies I’ve mentioned are COSMIC members, and we’re eager to grow that community to include all others in the private and public sectors working to bring U.S. ISAM capabilities into routine use in space.

Tech Briefs: What progress has COSMIC made in its first year and what’s the future vision?

Richardson: Our first year has been dedicated to organizing, launching, and building the COSMIC community. To date our membership comprises nearly 800 authorized participants representing 180 organizations across the various sectors of the U.S. ISAM community, all of whom see the value in coordination and collaboration. COSMIC enables members to share information about planned or envisioned missions, existing or planned testbeds, and current technology maturation efforts. We had an impressive 600 individuals join us for our kickoff event in Maryland last November, and more than 300 joined our just-concluded Convergence member event in Utah.

In the future we will build on this solid foundation to identify specific gaps in technology, policy, operational needs, testing capability and capacity, and all other aspects of performing operational ISAM missions. COSMIC will aggregate the voices from among the U.S. ISAM community to address problems identified by any sector and drive efforts across sectors toward a common vision where safe, reliable, robust ISAM operations become routine.

Tech Briefs: You are the Chair of SAE Media Group’s Space Logistics conference being held on September 26-27 in Arlington, VA. What can attendees expect to learn at the event?

Richardson: This event will bring together government, industry, and academia to connect, learn, and shape the future of space logistics. Speakers will share ideas about innovative concepts and challenges unique to ISAM, and attendees have the opportunity to collaboratively discuss policy and regulation, operations, technology, architecture design, technical developments, and standards. I welcome all parties to join and be part of the effort at this pivotal phase in ISAM’s development and maturation, and I will be happy to discuss COSMIC in greater detail and answer any questions prospective members might have.

For more information visit here  . To register and learn more about the Space Logistics Conference, visit here  .

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