Orbit Fab Announces Plans for Hydrazine Refueling Depot in Orbit
Orbit Fab has announced plans for an orbital refueling depot. The Register reports:
Spacecraft running low on fuel could get a refill from an orbital station by the year 2025, according to a startup named Orbit Fab that reckons it can charge $20 million to top up your tank….
Orbit Fab is therefore hoping to build, for want of a better word, a depot 300 km from Earth in geostationary orbit that can send out shuttles each containing, say, 100kg of hydrazine to visiting satellites and potentially other spacecraft that need a refill and can plug into the tanks….
Co-founder and chief development officer Jeremy Schiel said government agencies and private operators have “expressed explicit interest to get refueled in the next three to five years.” He also said that the design of the fuel depot system is “basically done,” and that the company is now working on designing its fuel shuttles…..
Astroscale, an orbital debris removal biz, is the only customer that has publicly signed up for the satellite refueling service. Orbit Fab has committed to supplying 1,000 kilograms of xenon propellant to top up Astroscale’s Life Extension In-Orbit (LEXI) satellites, which are capable of being refueled in space and are scheduled to launch in 2026 into geostationary orbit.
21 responses to “Orbit Fab Announces Plans for Hydrazine Refueling Depot in Orbit”
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The best path is to go to the Moon for water shielding and build large human-crewed GEO telecom platforms. The exact opposite of the LEO megaconstellation abomination.
By 2025? Sounds very unlikely for a startup that doesn’t yet have anything.
You are bit mistaken in assuming they don’t have anything yet. They didn’t start yesterday and their hardware is quite far along.
Their Furphy experiment did well on ISS back in 2019 already
Yes, I shouldnt have said “don’t have anything”, but three years is not very long at all for something like this. I just don’t believe the timescale.
This wasn’t concocted today, the whole project has been long in progress.There’s conference papers, hardware demo days, several defense contracts and awards.
If it does get to orbit in 2025, that will make the development timeline roughly 7 something or more years since the team started on it.
Quite well placed compared to many other orbital transfer or infrastructure services startups
Orbit Fab just has to build its thingamabobster. It does not have to build a rocket to launch it.
“…large human-crewed GEO telecom platforms”
That is hilarious ?!
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Yeah… almost as if some crude AI mixed and matched words to create that comment… it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever ?
5 months ago: “BN7 is almost complete (minus the engines) and SN24 is also late in production. Given SpaceX usual pace when building/testing things, I would say that their chances of launching Starship in June or July are not zero (pending FAA approval of course):
Now THAT is a hilariously crude AI.
The typical cyberthug three-step sequence is to trivialize-mock-denigrate.
The resident sociopath and Aerospit are both high in the ranks of disgusting spacex fanboy creeps.
I’m really not a SpaceX fanboy. I’m just a space geek that is impressed by any company/organization that gets sh*t done.
Yeah, Starship is “late” and my prediction was overly optimistic… so what? They still don’t have a launch license/permit, so the point is moot anyway.
But please enlighten us about the benefits of “human-crewed GEO telecom platforms”?
I believe the enlightenment consists of “Arthur C Clark was a Genius, so SHUT UP”. While the rest of us can figure out that Isaac Newton was a genius, but without applicability to Einsteinian physics.
What you believe is very clear. That it is garbage is also obvious to anyone except your fellow Cult members.
The cyberthug three step: trivialize-mock-denigrate. The worst creeps on the internet.
LOL…..you are not really a spacex fanboy. Well you lie like the rest of “us” who are not drunk on NewSpace Kool-aid breathe by starting out with that Orwellian truth reversal- when I cut and pasted a comment you made, that shows you really are one. But not really, huh? You sound like a Trumpist to.
Enlighten “us” gives your Musk Mob affiliation away, and your buddy chimed right in.
“If you need the real estate on the ground anyway, just put the solar panels on the ground (and combine them with batteries) and you will still come out ahead economically even considering reduced sunshine because of weather and night.”
That is a lie. And goes right along with rocket jesus calling Space Solar Power “the stupidest idea ever.” Not a fanboy, puh-leez.
It’s an idea that makes sense to people who think modern communications equipment is akin to those old manual switchboards, and requires regular maintinance by a repair technician testing and replacing vacuum tubes.
The microchip killed that. I would have liked to have seen Orbital Antenna farms–just slide electronics boxes in and out—keep the big dish structures—less space-junk.
You and Gary are the foremost space nostalgiasts on these forums. When one considers that most of the human future in space is exactly that – in the future – it’s really kind of a weird thing to be.
I’ve no problem with nostalgia, I’m just baffled by the adamant refusal to consider newer concepts, as if they were morally reprehensible.
I think spaceflight, like the Internet, are technologies we have at the moment…which could be lost soon. My hope is that we launch enough HLLVs to have Earth-Moon and Earth-Mars cyclers so that Falcon Heavy launched Dragons are just fast taxies. Maybe Starship will work…maybe it won’t.
You should define space junk, as it sounds like you’re implying a megaconstellation in LEO qualifies simply by existing.
I guess the register should brush up their knowledge about orbits a little bit before reporting the next space story…
You saw that too huh.