**3. Making a mental shift from using space to being in space**

A large part of our effort as a spacefaring society is still within the close vicinity of Earth. As the use of satellites for communications, strategic positioning, global positioning, monitoring of agriculture, climate and environment, among many other applications, are seeing a tremendous break into the daily routines of businesses and policy decision-making, the World looks up to the artificial stars in orbit ever more. This psychological adoption of the orbiting tools, embedded in every vehicle, phone or connected device has made a very long way into making space-borne tools as much ubiquitous as placing a long-distance call or following navigation routes to the regular human. Space is a very real extension of the connected human.

Communication platforms and atomic clocks are in constant connection with human interacting devices. The actual psychological boundary is to make the thought that everyday human physically *can* transfer through that dimension on a more regular basis. To enable such a mental shift to happen practically is a generational effort and a civilizational challenge. It would be a postulate to claim here that we are in the midst of its inception. At the forefront of this is a vision, of many, in their own way, to reach space. There is commercial willingness to follow space as a market, and also a vast amount of engineering exploration, life-long expertise and dedication. The first practical step, the closest, will be orbiting Earth, settling there, making *rendez-vous*, refueling, maintenance, repairs, etc. The second practical step is enabling engineering/commercial solutions to transport *commoners* to/through space according to their needs.

### **3.1 Enabling engineering of in-orbit transfer, servicing and assembly**

In this regard, the Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations [8] is a 2016 DARPA-funded industry initiative to create an ecosystem of industries cooperating to generate a long-term viable space industry commercial service environment. The Consortium has eventually morphed in two parts, one focusing on the technical aspect of satellite servicing, initially establishing common standards for safe operations and then, hardware standards for interfaces. On the policy side, preparation is made to inform the regulatory system and to lobby regulators that the Consortium answers properly to their vision.

A satellite servicing platform was launched in 2019 by SpaceLogistics, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. The platform is called the Mission Extension Vehicle

(MEV-1). It docked to Intelsat 901 early 2020, a geostationary communications satellite. It took over the attitude and navigation control for the next 5 years of extended operation of the telecommunication satellite. An increment of the concept extends beyond attitude and navigation control. DARPA owned payload (Mission Robotic Vehicle; MRV) will be transported by SpaceLogistics in a future launch (2023) which intends to add on-orbit repair, augmentation, assembly, detailed inspection and relocation of client satellites.

In the same thought process, Orbit Fab, a 2018 start-up, tested in 2019 the onorbit transfer of water to two pseudo-satellites before transferring the water to the ISS. Called Rapidly Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface (RAFTI), this technology is applicable to fuel, even compressed Xenon [9]. This market segment niche, for the short term, is to support in-orbit relocation services and deployment of pluri-orbit systems. In the longer term, larger opportunities exist with this proven technology to support in-orbit assembly of complex vehicles for long-haul transport in the solar system. The first operational tanker, Tanker-001 Tenzing was launched the 30th of June 2021 by the SpaceX Sherpa-FX orbital transfer vehicle [10].
