This Weekend, a Startup’s Robot Will Launch to Rescue the Swift Space Telescope

US space startup Katalyst Space is about to fulfill a prestigious contract with NASA, making it one of the few non-giant private aerospace companies to collaborate with the government agency. Its aim is to launch a robotic satellite capable of adjusting another satellite’s orbit without any prior preparation.

Katalyst will attempt to adjust the orbit of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory—and there are only a few months in which to act. After that, the 22-year-old observatory’s orbit will decay to the point that it burns up in the atmosphere.

That’s why, this Saturday, June 27, Katalyst will launch its LINK robotic satellite into space from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific. Once in orbit, LINK will spend weeks approaching and capturing Swift, and then spend two to three months applying extra thrust to arrest Swift’s descent and lift it back into a long-lasting orbit.

This is not technically a first, as the Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) 1 has already accomplished this feat with a European communications satellite, and MEV-2 is currently docked doing the same. It is, however, a first for a private company, and a new type of functionality for NASA.

Humorously, Katalyst’s vice president of strategic partnerships said: “This is a historic mission, you know, some would call it the first of its kind.” Yes, I’m sure that some would.

The part of the Swift Observatory, labeled for your convenience.
Credit: NASA

The Swift Observatory is home to three telescopes. The first is the Burst Alert Telescope, which detects gamma-ray bursts in real time. The second and third are the Ultraviolet-Optical Telescope and X-Ray Telescope, which primarily image in the visible range, though the latter can also capture the afterglow of such events at their respective wavelengths.

If you’re wondering whether Swift is still functional, its readings have been used to investigate comet 3I/ATLAS and to examine the afterglow of multiple gamma-ray events in 2025. Given the delay in publishing such research, we can assume it’s been transmitting equally valuable data through 2026, but that such research hasn’t yet been published.

While the likes of Lockheed and even SpaceX have long been entwined with government operations, the era of true public-private partnership is meant to look a lot more like this new collaboration. It’s a new level of notoriety for an upstart company, though probably because Katalyst has some real experience behind it.

Despite being a brand-new startup, Katalyst seems to have a founding team with real connections to past NASA missions, high-level academic institutions, and Space Force contracts. That being the case, they seem well-positioned to take this project to completion.

Still, it’s a risky maneuver. If this necessarily rushed timeline leads to a failure, the fact that Swift was on course for death anyway will likely be ignored; instead, the fact that NASA’s startup partners killed a scientific instrument will become the narrative.

So, whether this mission is a success or a failure, it could still serve as an inflection point for the funding of future missions to space.