WALLOPS ISLAND, Virginia—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?

Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.

That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.

Reaching the finish line

The Swift observatory is flying in low-Earth orbit, where the outermost layers of the atmosphere still exert some aerodynamic influence on satellites. The spacecraft launched in November 2004 on a mission to detect gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the known Universe. Despite its age, astrophysicists still rely on Swift’s multi-wavelength instruments to identify and locate gamma-ray bursts for follow-up observations by other observatories.

But there's a hitch. Swift lacks any thrusters to maintain its orbit, so aerodynamic drag has gradually caused its altitude to decay. The observatory launched into an orbit roughly 363 miles (585 km) above the Earth. As of Thursday, Swift was flying at 225 miles (363 km). The decay rate will increase as the spacecraft dips into denser layers of the atmosphere until Swift finally burns up during reentry.

Swift is losing altitude faster than anticipated due to a period of extraordinary solar activity in recent years. An active Sun puffs up Earth's atmosphere, creating higher drag for satellites in low-Earth orbit. Satellites and space debris routinely reenter the atmosphere, and most of Swift is likely to burn up before it falls to Earth's surface.

"But this was not just any spacecraft," Domagal-Goldman said. "This is an observatory with unique capabilities for astrophysics, similar to what its name would imply. It is a swift observatory that can quickly pivot across the night sky to find things that go boom in the night ... So we decided, yeah, we want to go save this one, this time, because of how special it is. But then we had a different challenge of time was running out."

NASA engineers estimate Swift will fall below an altitude of 186 miles (300 km) this fall—perhaps around October. At that altitude, Swift will be too low for Katalyst to safely approach it due to the effects of increasing drag. NASA gave Katalyst less than a year to design and build the satellite. The Swift rescue mission had to launch before the end of June.

"To be honest, no one thought it was going to be possible. No one thought we would get as far as we've already gotten today," Domagal-Goldman said. "And I have to be honest, there are still risks ahead of us, but I'm both deeply thankful and as optimistic as I can be that we'll meet those challenges because of the people that have worked on it."

Three xenon-fueled Hall-effect thrusters are test-fired on Katalyst's Link spacecraft inside a thermal vacuum chamber at Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland. Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies

Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft is now complete and ready for launch, a prospect that wasn't a given just a few months ago, when Ars visited the company's factory in Colorado. At that time, engineers were racing to piece together the Link satellite from a mix of structural components, fuel tanks, solar arrays, thrusters, and robotic arms designed to grab onto Swift more than 200 miles above the planet.

It all came together just in time. Katalyst shipped the Link satellite from its Colorado factory to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland for a battery of thermal vacuum and vibration tests this spring to simulate the environments it will see in space and during launch. Then the satellite shipped to NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia for integration with its ride to space: Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL rocket.

The Pegasus XL is an air-launched vehicle. It releases from a modified commercial airliner at about 39,000 feet, then ignites a series of three solid-fueled rocket motors to climb and accelerate into orbit. After 45 missions since 1990, this is the final Pegasus rocket scheduled to fly.

Katalyst selected the Pegasus XL largely for its mobility. Swift is in an unusual orbit that takes the observatory between 20 degrees north and south latitude on each trip around the Earth. That makes Swift hard to reach from a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, without a dedicated launch on an oversized, more expensive rocket. The Link spacecraft, weighing just under a half-ton at launch, fits snugly within the Pegasus rocket's payload fairing.

Northrop Grumman's L-1011 carrier jet will transport the 58-foot-long (18-meter) Pegasus rocket with the Link servicing satellite to a location over the remote equatorial Pacific Ocean near Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The multi-day journey to Kwajalein from the Pegasus integration base in Virginia began Thursday with the L-1011's departure from Wallops. Launch is scheduled for June 27.

Doing the impossible

It would normally take several years for a satellite of Link's complexity to be designed, manufactured, tested, and launched. So how did NASA, Katalyst, and Northrop Grumman do it in less than a year?

They did it by throwing out the playbook. NASA's normal bureaucratic process for soliciting proposals for new missions can take months or even years.

"We didn't send out a solicitation because we didn't have time to," Domagal-Goldman told Ars. "Normally, that's what we would do, but those solicitations take time for the respondents to respond and for us to review them. Instead, what we did was we looked at who we had on contract already to do technology development, and we asked three teams that were on contract to do a study for what they could do."

Katalyst was already working on a commercial demonstration mission for its Link servicing platform. Upon its selection by NASA for the Swift rescue mission, Katalyst quickly pivoted that private investment to meet the agency's need.

In order to do that, the company's leaders knew they had to accept some additional risk. Katalyst quickly put out orders to suppliers for all the parts required to assemble the Link spacecraft. In some cases, Katalyst found their suppliers couldn't deliver in time, and they decided to build parts themselves. Engineers also streamlined the Link spacecraft's test campaign to meet NASA's deadline.

"We're in an unusual situation where the schedule dictates how much risk we’re willing to accept, rather than the other way around," said Kieran Wilson, Link's principal investigator at Katalyst. "The clock is ticking on Swift's descent, so we have to find a balance between testing and problem solving that gives the mission the best chance of success."

Link is just the second space mission developed by Katalyst after a technology demonstration launched in 2024 by Atomos Space, a company Katalyst acquired last year.

"When we kicked off the program, I think everyone recognized the biggest risk would be that we weren't ready to launch in time, that Swift would fall faster than we could get up. We have been able to retire that risk over the last few months by building, testing, and getting ready to operate a spacecraft," Wilson said. "So that I think has retired the bulk of the overarching concern. Now, there is a lot of residual risk in the program. We still have to get the spacecraft on orbit and operate the spacecraft there successfully, and as we've all seen before, that's a very challenging thing to do."

The Link spacecraft integrated with Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL rocket. Credit: NASA/Ron Beard

It also helped that Northrop Grumman had all the parts for the Pegasus XL rocket in storage. The last two Pegasus rockets were originally ordered by Stratolaunch, a company originally owned by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Stratolaunch gave up the rockets after Allen's death in 2018, and Northrop was free to sell them to other customers. It sold one to the Space Force in 2021, and the other to Katalyst last year.

Whatever happens after Link's launch, NASA and its partners believe they've written a new template for how to do a responsive space mission.

"Some would call it the first of its kind, a robotic spacecraft that can go and capture an unprepared satellite," said Robert Lamontagne, vice president for strategic partnerships at Katalyst. "It's a commercial mission, first and foremost. It's doing an operational, real-world objective. It's not just a demonstration, and we're doing this as a service ... This is really a blueprint for commercial and government partnerships."

"From a programmatics standpoint, I consider this a success already, just from the fact that we're even going to try this," Domagal-Goldman said.

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From the wood boardwalk that leads to its front doors to the weathered steel of its facade to the rough-hewn timber beams inside, there’s an unmistakable postindustrial feel to the new Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music. Opening to the public on June 13, the center is a space built to house Springsteen’s archives and exhibitions on his life and music, but also to tell the broader story of American music. It’s also a tribute to the working-class American environment so central to Springsteen’s music and life.

Naturally, the center is on the New Jersey shore near his hometown. It is located in West Long Branch on the campus of Monmouth University, where Springsteen played many of his earliest shows. It also sits just four blocks from where The Boss wrote his 1975 masterpiece “Born to Run.”

As the center’s name suggests, it’s not a museum solely about Bruce Springsteen—a distinction made at the behest of the ever-humble musician himself. The idea for the center came from Bob Santelli, a longtime Rolling Stone journalist who was among the founding curators of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which opened in 1995, and several other music-related museums in the three decades since. In Springsteen’s music he saw an opportunity to explore a deep connection between the art and the place it’s from.

More than a tribute to a superstar

Santelli, who has been writing about Springsteen since 1973, reached out to him to ask if he’d be interested in creating a museum. “This was an opportunity to make sure that Bruce’s legacy is preserved and celebrated in the state that he’s synonymous with,” Santelli says. Springsteen was not keen on the idea of making a museum all about himself. “He said, my feeling is that I’m a part of the American music story. I’m a chapter of it.” So Santelli reworked the concept, and broadened it to place Springsteen within the longer arc of American music.

The architecture firm CookFox won an invited 2018 competition to design the center. Its cofounder, Rick Cook, says that although he first saw Springsteen in concert back in 1977, he was not exactly an enthusiast. “The truth was I wasn’t a Bruce fan because I’m not a music fan specifically,” he says.

But then Cook read Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, and soon after went to see Springsteen on Broadway. He became a convert. “Bruce has his own magic act, and its foundation is storytelling,” he says. “So I started to view the project through that lens.”

A tribute to place

Cook’s team drew on the working-class themes of Springsteen’s music and persona to develop the center’s design concept. “We wanted it to speak about the kind of postindustrial America that Bruce writes about, the beauty and nobility of these places,” he says.

Santelli says the idea was a good fit from the start. “There wasn’t a whole lot to change, to be quite honest,” he says. “We were really, really pleased with the simplicity, but the elegance also . . . it captured the industrial workmanlike environment that Bruce wrote his songs in and writes songs about.”

The building is a relatively simple rectangular form with its two stories clad in rusted, weathering steel. Surrounded by a meadow of grasses and flowers, it appears to float on a coastal dune. And the main entry to the museum is approached by a boardwalk, another Jersey shore reference. “The idea wasn’t so much that it was the literal representation of a boardwalk,” Cook says, “but that everybody crosses that threshold together.”

Inside its doors, the center opens up into a double-height space framed with huge pieces of rough timber. “The big wood columns and big wood beams hold the floors up. So there’s a directness to the storytelling and the architecture that we believed was consistent with the honesty and the directness of American music and Bruce’s music specifically,” Cook says.

The ground floor features a 240-seat auditorium where visitors watch a 25-minute introductory overview of the center, narrated by Springsteen himself. Designed to concert-grade technical and acoustical standards, it will also be used for live performances. The rest of the floor is less Springsteen specific, with a large permanent gallery tracking the evolution of American music from Indigenous songs to contemporary recordings, a temporary gallery space with an inaugural show about protest songs, and a few smaller galleries on the history of the electric guitar, and Springsteen’s connection to Monmouth University.

Upstairs is all Springsteen, with several galleries documenting his story, his various bands, and is long career leading the E Street Band. Interactive features include a music studio where visitors can remix “Born to Run” and a space where people can get a virtual drumming lesson from the E Street Band drummer, Max Weinberg. Much of the 4,200-square-foot floor is used to house Springsteen’s 48,000-item archive of handwwritten lyrics, concert posters, magazine clippings, and paraphernalia from tours around the world.

“It is not a biographical series of exhibitions,” says Santelli. “Rather, it is primarily a story about the creative process, about how he created the music, and what his music means to New Jersey and America in general.”

Fan service

Santelli comes to his role as executive director of the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music after 16 years leading the Grammy Museum, and creating music museums like the Woody Guthrie Center, in Tulsa. “I’ve seen my share of egos,” he says. But the experience working with Springsteen was unlike many of the interactions he’s had with famous musicians. “We found Bruce almost too humble,” he says.

However, as a New Jersey native and a graduate of Monmouth University, Santelli knew the project would have high standards to meet. “There’s a lot of pressure when you’re dealing with someone like Bruce Springsteen in the state of New Jersey to make sure that you’ve done the legacy right, you’ve told the right story, and you’ve made it educationally relevant, which was the point,” he says.

Springsteen was mostly hands off during the design process, and only made his first visit to the space with its exhibitions installed in early June, less than two weeks before its public opening. “He gave us a double thumbs-up,” Santelli says. “Of course, I was very relieved.”

There will certainly be some scrutiny, though, especially among Springsteen’s large fan base. A fan group called the Spring-Nuts recently got a sneak peek at the center, and many more longtime fans are sure to visit. Santelli’s confident they’ll get the experience they expect. And it’s sure to win over new fans, too. After eight years working on the project, Cook, who didn’t follow music beforehand, is now a devotee to the artist. “I’m one of those Springsteen fans who knows every word,” he says.