I grew up in the middle of nowhere Virginia. Like many of you I was a nerd, and I had no outlet for that nerd-dom until I spent all summer working for money to buy a C64. I taught myself assembly, and was a high school intern at NASA Langley where I learned about parallel processing, was introduced to the idea that people would actually pay you money to program computers, and had a tour of their space robotics lab.

When I went to college the guy two doors down from me in the dorm decided he wanted to build a robot, and he recruited me because I knew how to code. We spent freshman year working on a six-legged frame walker which we dreamed would explore Mars someday (this was in the late 1980s, long before the first Mars rover). It didn't work for crap -- the late 1980s were a disaster for makers, we had to source everything from the hardware store or Radio Shack. It was also the most amazing thing I'd ever done, and from then on I was an aspiring space roboticist.

I managed to not fail out, but it was close.

I went to grad school at the University of Maryland's Space Systems Lab under Dave Akin ("Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design"), where I learned control theory and a ton of hands-on skills and got to scuba dive supporting the development of Ranger, which could have been the first US satellite servicer except we could never find a launch for it. I graduated with a PhD in aerospace engineering in 2003, and got hired by NRL, where I worked on RSGS.

"Since the mission is designed to attach one and then leave to go to another satellite that needs servicing?"

Yes.

Too complicated for disassembly. But totally valid for modification.

https://spacenews.com/chinas-orbital-maneuvers-blur-the-line...

the probe ramming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJZ3xmuom0M

One of the things that people who don't pay attention to space based infrastructure find odd, if you tell them, is that in the entire history of manned spaceflight no human has ever gone to geostationary orbit.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=russian+s...

Outside of GEO, nobody in the public really knows what the X-37 does when it's in orbit, but one of the theories I have seen thrown around is that it's capable of approaching and inspecting other things in LEO, or theoretically even grabbing or manipulating one in some way.

Any service functions of existing equipment would depend on charge interface or communications functions that are not exposed or standardized.

It will make a good season to practice kinetic adjustments until the fleets start shipping terminals for Astromech droids.