Commercial Spacecraft Rescue Offers NASA a Template for Servicing Aging Satellites

NASA's Swift Boost mission launched July 3 to deploy Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft, a robotic servicer that will dock with and reboost the Swift Observatory—a 20-year-old gamma-ray telescope—to a higher orbit. The $30 million effort extends the instrument's useful life by roughly a decade. If successful, it establishes the first commercial model for in-orbit satellite servicing, potentially applicable across NASA's fleet of aging observatories.