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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

> Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the RSGS payload is designed and developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The payload is integrated on the Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) spacecraft, developed by SpaceLogitistics, a Northrop Grumman company, and was launched onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

That's quite a who's who of public-private partnership. It's fascinating to watch these commercial space industries develop in real-time.

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Almost all the ‘servicing’ and ‘orbital debris cleanup’ robot-arm sats are funded quite heavily by military end users, because there is really no market for their stated aims and a huge market for the unstated aims - flying up to an adversary’s satellite and messing it up. Open secret in the industry.

As I understand it, the current on-orbit service functions include... orbit manipulations.

Any service functions of existing equipment would depend on charge interface or communications functions that are not exposed or standardized.

It will make a good season to practice kinetic adjustments until the fleets start shipping terminals for Astromech droids.

Presumably it's also known to everyone who builds/operates these that having a foreign nation's military satellite intentionally approach your own geostationary satellite to within a very short distance, as the vast area up there goes, is a very thinly veiled threat or demonstration of capability.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=russian+s...

Outside of GEO, nobody in the public really knows what the X-37 does when it's in orbit, but one of the theories I have seen thrown around is that it's capable of approaching and inspecting other things in LEO, or theoretically even grabbing or manipulating one in some way.

TIL DARPA is still around. Kind of thought they got the “doge” treatment

Defense doesn’t get DOGE’d, only programs that build up communities do. There’s always budget for more destruction.

Wait until you find out which agency founded the Internet

The internet was conceived to be something very different from the web we all know and loathe. Anyway, I think GP was referring to building community centres, schools, libraries, and caring for vulnerable people. Those, it seems, were fully DOGE'd.

DOGE got DOGE'd itself. It doesn't exist anymore.

But why isn’t it called WARPA now?

Since Pete took the helm and renamed things, it's definitely now the Whiskey Advanced Research Projects Agency.

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