f28

"I wish our auditors understood our business well enough to audit it - because then I could hire them for 10 times what they are being paid. We desperately need those people."

Asking out of ignorance; What skill set in particular is he referring to here? What do those people need to do to understand the business?

edit: Thanks for the enlightening responses, Gents.

It might seem wasteful, but the geo-satellite industry has grown into this kind of regular life cycle.

As propulsion technology gets better for station-keeping, (see: ion engines) and as it becomes more practical to fit bigger and better (and more) transponders on a bird the economics of replacing satellites on a regular basis start to look quite good. The hope is that the additional revenue of being able to service more (a lot more) customers than the last satellite was able will outweigh the cost building a new bird and losing the revenue of the old one.

As for design: A major part of getting a satellite into orbit is the labor of engineering. It's rocket science. It takes very specialized professionals years of work to design and test and redesign and build and rebuild (etc) the busses that geo birds fly on.

note: in general, most satellites can be considered to be two parts, a bus (fuel, thrusters, batteries, solar arrays, momentum wheels, navigation, command/control etc) and an antenna/sensor/mission specific hardware. for a communications satellite, this would be a bank of transponders and massive radio dishes for signal I/O for example.

so given the environment of tight budget constraints and a timeline to keep, managers responsible for Bus development projects (in the past) have not been too keen on spending time (money!) on features that would only be useful if there were already a servicer in orbit. Things like conveniently placed/highly visible docking fixtures and easy access fill/drain valves would be nice for a servicer, but there has never been one. yet.

tl;dr: satellites are expensive and its hard to accommodate a robot when you dont know exactly what it looks like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine#Rocket_fuel

It either needs iridium or N2O4.