Goals
The project hoped to demonstrate several satellite servicing operations and technologies including rendezvous, proximity operations and station keeping, capture, docking, fluid transfer (specifically, hydrazine on this mission), and ORU (Orbit Replaceable Unit) transfer. A prime military mission would be to refuel reconnaissance satellites so they can improve coverage, increase surprise and be more survivable.
The fluid (fuel) and ORU (battery) transfers were completed successfully at the lowest levels of spacecraft autonomy. Subsequent transfers over a three month period were intended to demonstrate greater autonomy.
Read more about this topic: Orbital Express
Famous quotes containing the word goals:
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come from such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals renders the goals themselves despicable.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)