Comment by ballooney
4 hours ago
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.
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.
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.