Thanks! There isn't a paper yet, but I'm working on one; I hope it will be presented at the upcoming iSAIRAS/iSpaRo conference in Cologne.

Oh gosh.

I grew up in the middle of nowhere Virginia. Like many of you I was a nerd, and I had no outlet for that nerd-dom until I spent all summer working for money to buy a C64. I taught myself assembly, and was a high school intern at NASA Langley where I learned about parallel processing, and had a tour of their space robotics lab.

When I went to college the guy two doors down from me in the dorm decided he wanted to build a robot, and he recruited me because I knew how to code. We spent freshman year working on a six-legged frame walker which we dreamed would explore Mars someday (this was in the late 1980s, long before the first Mars rover). It didn't work for crap -- the late 1980s were a disaster for makers, we had to source everything from the hardware store or Radio Shack. It was also the most amazing thing I'd ever done, and from then on I was an aspiring space roboticist.

I managed to not fail out, but it was close.

I went to grad school at the University of Maryland's Space Systems Lab under Dave Akin ("Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design"), where I learned control theory and a ton of hands-on skills and got to scuba dive supporting the development of Ranger, which could have been the first US satellite servicer except we could never find a launch for it. I graduated with a PhD in aerospace engineering in 2003, and got hired by NRL, where I worked on RSGS.

Sort of mini-fridge sized. They take over attitude control and propulsion for satellites that are low on fuel.

"Since the mission is designed to attach one and then leave to go to another satellite that needs servicing?"

Yes.

> on-orbit disassembly of a hostile nation's satellite?

Too complicated for disassembly. But totally valid for modification.

Yes, China demonstrated this capability a couple year ago with towing a geo sat to a different orbit. It only makes sense to go tit-for-tat on these capabilities for servicing and the unspoken offensive ability.

https://spacenews.com/chinas-orbital-maneuvers-blur-the-line...

I would think there are much less expensive and more rapid methods of "on-orbit disassembly" than a system like this?

We use pretty standard BLDCs.