Space News Deep Dive: Saving Swift

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Swift is falling. That is, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory will soon tumble out of low Earth orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. Seeing as this observatory fills a key spot in NASA’s suite of orbiting observatories helping us increase our understanding of the universe (and seeing as the telescope was not supposed to be falling out of orbit at this point in its existence) this is what you might call a bummer. So long Swift, you were a pretty great telescope.

But wait! What ho! Hope upon the horizon! For NASA has decided that it’s not ready to give up on Swift just yet, and has teamed up with the private company Katalyst Space Technologies to do something never before attempted: rescue a space telescope falling out of orbit! And I. Am. PUMPED.

So please let me drag you along as I gush about Swift, dive into the reasons behind its unexpected fall from its lofty height, and explore just how NASA and Katalyst hope to save it.

Flying Swiftly

Swift is a rare gem among orbital telescopes. For one thing, it’s not really one telescope, but rather three telescopes in a trench coat (er, spacecraft bus). Its body houses the Burst Alert Telescope, which has a wide field of view and can spot gamma rays, the X-ray Telescope which detects, well, x-rays, and the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope which…okay, you get it.

That made Swift a first of its kind when it launched in 2004. Nothing else had that kind of diverse capability. None of these telescopes are large, not like Hubble or Webb, but the variety of things it’s capable of observing with a single pointing was unprecedented. And boy can it point.

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Swift actually launched not as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, but just as plain old Swift (Neils Gehrels was the telescope’s principal investigator, aka the head scientist. After his 2017 death it was renamed in his honor). That’s not a name or an acronym, it’s actually just a reference to the fact that this telescope can point itself very quickly using a set of reaction wheels to slew around. That plus its ability to see in so many wavelengths at once makes it an incredible first responder telescope for transient events. Something new lights up in the sky and Swift can be one of the first things to view it (and do so with several telescopes at once).

And because Swift relies on those reaction wheels to turn itself, rather than a system of fuel-fed thrusters, its lifetime is not limited to a fuel supply the way, say, Webb’s will be. Essentially as long as it has power and those reaction wheels can turn, Swift can continue to operate (as it has for nearly 22 years). That is, as long as the Sun doesn’t conspire to chuck it out of orbit.

Puffed Up

Remember the solar storms of 2024? When the Sun was undergoing solar maximum and having a good time doing it? Remember the aurora reaching as far south as Puerto Rico? It was a good time for us here on Earth. It was less of a good time for anything in low Earth orbit.

One thing that happens during intense solar activity is that Earth’s atmosphere puffs up. Essentially you start seeing air molecules at much higher altitudes than you do when the Sun is feeling chill. This means that things that live in low Earth orbit encounter a lot more atmospheric drag than they normally do. And this is a big problem.

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The more drag a satellite encounters, the more it slows down. The more it slows down, the lower it drops. The lower it drops, the more atmosphere it hits and the more drag it feels. Eventually it falls right out of orbit, unless it can boost back to a higher altitude. The International Space Station, for instance, orbiting at a height of roughly 250 miles (400 km) gets boosted about once a month by the engines of one of the spacecrafts attached to its docking ports. It needs one of these attached spacecrafts to do the work because it has no thrusters of its own.

And you know what? Neither does Swift. In the last two years atmospheric drag has dropped Swift’s orbit by nearly 120 miles (193 km), from around 370 miles (595 km) up to about the height of the ISS. It has no way of stopping itself. Left to its own devices, by the end of 2026, it’s calculated, Swift will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. But not if NASA has anything to say about it.

Asking the Impossible

In August 2025 NASA made what seemed like an impossible request: could anybody design, build, test, and launch something by mid-2026 that could stave off Swift’s reentry—and do it for only $30 million? That’s, frankly, an insane timeline and a ridiculously tight budget, especially when you’re talking about a new kind of spacecraft! Launching a completely new spacecraft takes, at the fastest, years when done by the book. But in this case NASA was willing to chuck the book out the window, at least a little. It helped that they lucked out a bit.

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Katalyst Space Technologies, founded in 2020, was already thinking about how to service orbital spacecraft to extend their lifetimes. What’s more, they were already hoping to do some sort of demonstration flight in 2026. In September 2025, NASA awarded Katalyst the contract. Nine months later, Katalyst’s LINK servicing spacecraft is built and has completed testing, on time and on budget.

The company was able to contract with Northrup Grumman to put LINK on one of its Pegasus XL rockets (the very last one, as it happens), and the rocket is heading for the launch site, hoping to launch before the month is out (current target date is June 27). Turns out sometimes the impossible isn’t quite as impossible as you think it is, if you’re determined enough.

The Rescue

The benefit of using a Pegasus XL rocket to get LINK into space is that this rocket actually gets carried aloft under the belly of an airplane, the Stargazer. The Stargazer drops the rocket which then fires its engine to boost itself the rest of the way into space. That means it doesn’t require a traditional launchpad—anywhere with a runway long enough to accommodate the Stargazer can serve as a launch site. LINK will be heading skyward from the Marshall Islands.

I should say at this point that Katalyst’s servicing spacecraft’s name is always written out as LINK, as though it’s an acronym. If it is, I can’t find a single source that lists what the acronym is. Maybe someone on the design team is just a really enthusiastic “Legend of Zelda” fan.

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Anyway, LINK has to launch soon because it’s estimated that by October Swift will be too low for anything to be done to save it, and it will take a few weeks after launch for LINK to catch up to Swift. Once there, it has to latch on. Swift was not designed for this and was never intended to dock with anything. LINK is just gonna have to grab it.

Seeing as the “just grab it” approach poses some risk to Swift if done poorly, LINK is going to need to make a detailed survey of the telescope before ground teams can decide the best places for its three grappling arms to go. It might seem like an easy thing to plan out ahead of time, but remember Swift has been in space for over twenty years. At this point its insulating blankets might have gotten so brittle that they’ll actually shatter if LINK tries to grab them.

Assuming LINK can successfully snatch a hold on Swift, it will then spend several weeks gently lifting the telescope to a higher orbit using its onboard thrusters. If everything goes well, this operation could net Swift another decade of life at least.

High Risk, High Reward

So much can go wrong here. The last of the Pegasus XL rockets needs to function perfectly. A first-of-its-kind spacecraft designed on a relatively shoestring budget with so many of the usual double-checking and just-in-case procedures discounted needs to perform on its first go. Swift needs to be able to be caught. There needs to not be another solar superstorm between now and October to degrade Swift’s orbit even faster. It will be easy for things to fail.

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But what if they succeed? What if everything goes right? Then a telescope that would cost an estimated $500 million to replace (as if Swift could ever truly be replaced) would be saved. If LINK can prove that in-orbit spacecraft servicing is a viable operation, it could be the foundation of an entire new industry devoted to extending the lifetimes of existing spacecraft. Perhaps it could lead to the development of bigger, beefier descendants of LINK that will someday save the lives of Hubble or even Webb. That seems like a long shot, but so did saving Swift.

The risks are high. But the rewards may just be incredible. Keep your fingers crossed.