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Refuel It or Strip It
The graveyard belt is the closest junkyard we've got.
Two hundred miles above the busiest orbit around Earth is a ring of dead satellites. Nobody put them there by accident. When a communications satellite runs low on fuel, its last job is to climb roughly three hundred kilometers above the geostationary belt and shut down, so it never drifts back into the traffic.1 There are about 560 working satellites in that belt today,2 and a couple dozen a year make the climb. They have been doing it since the 1980s. Nobody has ever gone up to collect.
Each one is a few tons of aluminum, titanium, solar cell, wiring, and pressure vessel, already sitting in the one orbit where we have said we will build. It cost somebody a hundred million dollars to put it there. And the only thing wrong with most of them is an empty tank.
Half of this is already done
In February 2020 a Northrop Grumman vehicle called MEV-1 flew up to the graveyard, docked with an Intelsat satellite that had been parked there, took over its steering, and flew it back down to work for five years. Then it towed it back up, undocked, and went looking for the next one.3 MEV-2 did the same thing in 2021 to a satellite still on station.4 And this past July they launched MRV-1, a robot with two arms that is designed to install small propulsion pods on as many as thirty satellites over its life.5
So the first revenue stream in this proposal isn't speculative. It's a business with customers. An operator pays to have its own bird refueled and put back to work, because that is cheaper than building and launching a replacement.
What nobody is doing is the other half. MEV rents a satellite more years. It does nothing about the ones that are genuinely finished: a dead transponder, a cracked panel, a bird where no amount of fuel makes it useful again. Those just stay parked. And from where we're standing, those are the valuable ones, because we are not trying to make them work. We want what they're made of.
The mothership and the pods
Think of a tugboat going out with a net. That is the idea in one picture: go out to the graveyard belt, gather up forty years of dead satellites, and bring them home. It's the right idea, and the rest of this section is only about what the hardware has to look like to do it, because nothing about orbit lets you do it the way a boat would.
A net works on a fishing boat because the water pushes back. In orbit there is nothing to push against, and a dead satellite isn't a fish. It's three tons with solar wings out, usually tumbling slowly, with no handle anybody designed for grabbing. Take hold of a tumbler carelessly and you don't catch it; you transfer its spin to yourself.
And a single tug towing a growing bundle can only be in one place at a time. The graveyard is a ring thousands of kilometers around. Working it one satellite at a time, out and back, would take a career.
So the tug becomes a mothership, and the net becomes a magazine of small ones.
Here is how a run goes. The mothership arrives near a dead satellite and releases one pod. The pod is small: a proven grip, a set of reaction wheels, an ion thruster, and enough smarts to do one job. It flies the last few hundred meters on its own, matches the satellite's rotation, and takes hold of the apogee engine nozzle in the tail, the one standard cone every geostationary satellite has and the same grapple point MEV-1 used.3 Then it uses its reaction wheels to kill the tumble, and when the thing is finally still, it lights its ion drive and starts the long, slow haul back to the station on its own.
The mothership doesn't wait and doesn't tow. It is already moving on to the next one, dropping another pod. It's a delivery vehicle for pods, not a barge.
That is what the ion drive buys you. It's feeble, grams of thrust, and it doesn't matter, because nothing up there is in a hurry. What it gives you instead is patience: a pod can push a three-ton derelict for months on almost no propellant, which is how MEV-1 itself took three and a half months to climb to the belt.6 And the satellites arrive at the station one at a time, on their own power, which is exactly how you would want them to arrive at a yard anyway.
What it's worth up there
An operator's satellite that is simply out of fuel is worth whatever a replacement costs, minus the price of the visit. That is the easy sale, and it is the one already being made.
The dead ones are a different calculation, and it is the one this magazine cares about. A three-ton derelict is three tons of aerospace-grade aluminum, titanium, copper wiring, and solar cell, already refined, already assembled by people who were being careful, and already sitting in the orbit where we intend to build. Compare that with the cost of putting three tons up from the ground. Nothing we can dig out of an asteroid or launch off a mountain is cheaper than metal that is already parked two hundred miles up the road.
And there is the cleanup argument sitting alongside the money. Every derelict we take out of the belt is one less thing to collide with, and at that altitude there is no atmosphere to clean up after a collision; a passivated satellite will circle for millions of years.7 Every piece we bring in is a piece that never becomes ten thousand pieces.
We just have to go get it
There is an order to this, and it is the same order everything in this magazine runs in. Launch the parts, build the yard, and the first thing the yard needs is metal. Two hundred miles up the road is forty years of it, parked in neat rows, already refined, already in orbit, already paid for by somebody else.
We just have to go get it. The ship is a rack of small robots, and the robots are a proven grip, a reaction wheel, and an ion thruster. None of that is new. What's new is pointing it at the graveyard instead of the customer, and doing it before we need the metal instead of after.
From one explorer to another, we appreciate you reading this far. We are excited about what this endeavor brings, and we would like you along for the rest of it.
Come join us. Because we are Star Bound.
John LangEditor
Ideas in Star Bound are published open — take them, build them better. Our open proposal.
A note on where this comes from. I am not a metallurgist, a spacecraft engineer, or a degreed engineer of any kind. But I am a practical one, with more than forty years in heavy industrial construction: welding, millwright work, hydraulics, mining, and thirty-three years of electrical construction and commissioning on the North Slope of Alaska, in a place that punishes anything built wrong. Much of that time I have worked as a field engineer, which means I am the one standing in front of the equipment when the drawing turns out to be wrong, and the fix has to be made on the spot, with what is on hand, and has to work the first time. Anyone who has done that long enough learns that a lot of engineering gets corrected in the field by people with more experience than the people who drew it. That is the eye I bring to these subjects: not what should work on paper, but what actually gets built, and what breaks. The facts I take from other people are footnoted so you can check them and read further. The ideas built on top of those facts are my own, and I would rather see them knocked down by somebody who knows better than left standing because nobody looked.
Sources
- Retiring GEO satellites are raised roughly 300 km above the geosynchronous altitude of 35,786 km; the IADC minimum is 235 km plus an allowance for solar radiation pressure. Wikipedia, Graveyard orbit; KeepTrack, What Is a Graveyard Orbit for Satellites?. ↩
- Active geostationary satellite counts: 569 (satsig.net list, updated 13 August 2026) and 561 (azmth.space, CelesTrak-derived, September 2026). Eric Johnston, List of satellites in geostationary orbit; azmth, How Many Satellites Are in Orbit?. ↩
- MEV-1 docked with Intelsat 901 in the graveyard orbit on 25 February 2020, gripping the satellite's liquid apogee engine as the grapple point, returned it to the geostationary arc, and undocked on 9 April 2025 after five years of service. Wikipedia, Intelsat 901; Northrop Grumman, First-Ever Undocking Between Two Commercial Spacecraft in Geosynchronous Orbit, April 2025. ↩
- MEV-2 docked with Intelsat 10-02 in April 2021 while that satellite remained in its operational orbit. eoPortal, MEV-1 & 2 (Mission Extension Vehicle-1 and -2). ↩
- MRV-1 launched 21 July 2026 on a Falcon 9 with three Mission Extension Pods; the vehicle carries two DARPA-funded robotic arms and is designed to install up to thirty pods over its life. NASASpaceFlight, Falcon 9 to launch MRV-1 robotic servicing spacecraft for Northrop Grumman; Northrop Grumman, Mission Robotic Vehicle Launches, July 2026. ↩
- The 2,330 kg MEV-1 took up to three and a half months to reach geostationary orbit on electric propulsion. eoPortal (note 4). ↩
- At graveyard altitude there is effectively no atmospheric drag, so a passivated spacecraft will remain in orbit for millions of years. Orbital Radar, What Is a Graveyard Orbit? Satellite Disposal Explained. ↩
This follows Send the Refinery, Not the Ore. The life-extension half of the argument is Northrop Grumman's business, footnoted above; the salvage half, the mothership-and-pods architecture, and the claim that the graveyard is the cheapest metal we will ever find are my own proposals. The tug-and-net picture was mine, as a way of describing the job, not a drawing of the hardware. I have never built a spacecraft, and a satellite operator or a servicing engineer who can show why the pod can't hold a tumbling derelict, or why the arithmetic on hauled-versus-launched metal doesn't close, is invited to write in.
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