Just weeks after its launch to boost the orbit of the Swift Space Telescope, it is announced that Katalysy Space’s LINK spacecraft will be unable to fulfill its primary mission after weeks of mishaps with attitude control, reaction control wheels, and power systems. Katalyst will still perform an approach and rendezvous test maneuver in the vicinity of the slowly deorbiting Swift Telescope, but LINK will be unable to save the larger spacecraft from its fate, and will in fact plunge back into Earth’s atmosphere in September, before Swift does the same. Katalyst Space and NASA state that the mission, constructed and launched at a much faster pace than most space missions, still produced useful data for the next attempt to reboost a satellite.
