Tow Trucks and Tug Boats in Space!

Surface Logistics Mirrored in Orbit

Cameron Penny, Business Relations Lead

4 minute read

When we look at the logistics of everyday life and business on Earth there are multiple terrestrial and aquatic examples of “relocation services”. Several come to mind such as taxis, trains, buses, and ferries for commuters and travelers. What about moving our stuff? We need to move our stuff and this comes down to hiring a service or doing it ourselves. While I am all about trying to do as much as I can to be self-sufficient, it doesn’t make sense for everyone to own a truck and trailer. Further, when it comes to situations like a breakdown on the highway or a big move, driving ourselves isn’t always an option.

Earthly Relocation Services

Thankfully there are solutions! In our everyday lives, we have the luxury of the following options:

Tow Trucks & Tug Boats: Not all tow trucks are created equal and vary based on the types of emergencies they respond to on the road. Depending on whether it’s a sedan or a semi that needs a tow, there are different power and maneuverability requirements for each. Similarly, tugboats serve a vital role in the ports and shipping lanes of the world. In order to maneuver these large ships with precision, the tugboats need to be incredibly strong and are a relatively stripped-down version of what a hauling vessel would do. Satellites in orbit, just like vehicles on Earth, typically will only need “tow-truck services” once in their lifetime.

Moving Trucks & Freight Haulers: Transporting the contents of your entire apartment across a significant distance is best when you can hire out a moving truck to make the task easier. Most people would opt for the efficiency of a single large trip, rather than the dozens of trips and logistics involved with packing your whole life into a commuter vehicle. Scaling up from residential moving, there are semis designed to haul all manners of freight around the country, including cold storage or other semis! It's easy to see that we need different vehicles of different sizes and weight classes to move cargo depending on the needs of that specific cargo.

Garbage Trucks: Lastly, we all create waste. Whether we are diligent about sorting the recycling and composting, or we put it all in one bin and ignore the details, refuse needs to be removed. Vehicles specifically designed to eliminate debris from piling up in our neighborhoods serve a vital role in keeping our society functioning. When sanitation workers resort to strikes, cities become near-uninhabitable in a matter of weeks. Space has been lacking proper sanitation services for 67 years and counting!

There is an opportunity cost of trying to provide all of these for ourselves. The same is true for a single satellite that’s also operating for a dedicated mission or performing a surface-based service. When you design a vehicle to try to do everything, it's not going to do each task as efficiently or to the best of its ability as a specialized support service.

The greatest value of these relocation services is efficiency by allowing for specialization. We don’t need to waste time and resources trying to do everything ourselves. Imagine if your everyday commuter vehicle needed to also be able to recover itself from any accident, be efficient for low-cost cross-country travel, have a large volume of cargo space to accommodate your maximum needs, and also collect your debris to be moved to a local disposal facility. While you could design an option that does all these things, it wouldn’t be as efficient as a dedicated vehicle for each individual task. Arguments could be made for the efficiency of a pickup truck meeting several of these needs, but even pickup trucks need tow trucks for rescue and they are moved across the country as cargo on semis for efficiency.

All of the above examples share a common thread. Each of these services - tow trucks, moving trucks, and garbage trucks - helps to collect and move something from one place to another, whether that's recovering from an emergency or cleaning up debris. Each of these is a service to relocate and this is the area of on-orbit servicing that the KMI team gets excited about!

Relocation Solutions In-Orbit

Tow Trucks & Tug Boats: Once in orbit thanks to a launch vehicle (rockets!), there are several options for an Orbital Transport Vehicle (OTV) to get satellites into the correct orbital path. With limited resources aboard most satellites, it helps to have a ride service you can reach out to for support! There is an additional benefit if a satellite needs to perform a task, like deorbit, only at the end of its decade-long operational life. Rather than invest in a system taking up valuable space, a specialized service could use those 10 years to improve the technology and then perform the service when it is needed by the original satellite.

Moving Trucks & Freight Haulers: Launch vehicles, or rockets to space, help get all of our cargo into space. Along the same lines as orbital transport vehicles, some launch systems maneuver single satellites and others multiple satellites. Growing beyond this are larger vessels that can transport cargo, other space vehicles, or even astronauts over further distances. Very rarely is the same vehicle used for both a ride to the moon and to place GPS or communications satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).

Garbage Trucks: Finally, it's no secret or surprise that there is space junk to deal with. The risk of collisions in orbit and the danger of debris falling to the wrong place on Earth are very real and serious scenarios that require steps for avoiding disaster. Specialized satellite designs have been proposed by several ambitious companies looking to help clean up space. This is an incredibly important step that we need to take as a responsible space-faring civilization. Just like we have systems for cleaning up debris and waste on Earth, we need systems for Earth's orbit.

KMI understands that there are several partners working to create the most excellent vehicles for their specific use case, including global communications, navigation and GPS, weather prediction, or a myriad of other space-based services. There is incredible efficiency in designing a system to safely capture and relocate a vehicle on orbit, without that vehicle needing to have been prepared prior to the mission. Reach out for more information on how KMI can help relocate your assets in space.