Skycorp was awarded a contract by an unnamed American aerospace company to develop a design and a plan for the commercial reboost of the International Space Station (ISS). The ISSRS would be used as a means to reduce the upmass requirements for ISS reboost by using a solar electric propulsion system instead of chemical propulsion. The ISSRS would have required about 250 kg of Xenon per year, resulting in a 90% decrease in the upmass otherwise required. The total delta v provided would have been almost 500 meters/sec over the life of the station. At a cost of over $3000/kg otherwise for chemical fuel, this system would have rapidly paid for itself. The aerospace company declined to move forward and was sold a few years later.
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Skycorp incorporated, subcontracting to the Time Domain Corporation of Huntsville Alabama was awarded a DARPA Phase I and later a Phase II SBIR for the development of a relative navigation system that would allow a fractionated or clustered spacecraft to know their relative positions to high precision. Skycorp’s role was for the application of the TDRNS sensor to the question of clustered spacecraft operation and developing mission scenarios for the use of the sensor for DARPA. This included the DARPA F6 program, which was a program for flying spacecraft that distributed tasks amongst the different spacecraft in a cluster, rather than in a large spacecraft. There are advantages to this architecture in that smaller more easily manufacturable and lower cost spacecraft can be used to, when aggregated, reproduce the capabilities of a larger system.
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