A mission to prevent a NASA space telescope from coming to a fiery demise in Earth’s atmosphere has failed, the agency announced Wednesday.
The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which launched into low Earth orbit in 2004, has been rapidly sinking in its orbit around Earth and is expected to plunge through the atmosphere later this year, breaking apart on re-entry.
Last month, NASA launched a first-of-its-kind rescue mission to boost the Swift observatory to a higher altitude, aiming to extend its life and keep its science work going. To do that, the Arizona-based company Katalyst Space Technologies developed a spacecraft called LINK, which was designed to capture the observatory and raise its orbit over several months.
LINK launched July 3 on Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus XL rocket. Then the problems began.
Mission managers successfully established communications with LINK after launch, but less than two weeks into the flight, teams began reporting problems with the probe’s orientation.
In a July 15 blog post, NASA officials said Katalyst engineers had “addressed early communications and attitude control issues.”
But software patches appeared to fail, and on July 28, NASA said LINK’s attitude control systems, which stabilize the spacecraft and help orient it in space, had malfunctioned, “causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications.”
LINK was rotating at about 9 degrees per second, according to NASA. Mission managers were able to fire the spacecraft’s thrusters to slow its spin this month, but it appears the spacecraft’s ongoing attitude control issues have now forced NASA to abandon the mission altogether.
“This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement.
Although LINK will not be able to boost the Swift observatory, NASA said Katalyst will still try to approach and rendezvous with it to conduct technology demonstrations that could be used on future flights.
“We are going to learn everything we can from LINK’s rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow,” Isaacman said in the statement.
Swift was designed to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe, which are triggered by cosmic events like the births of black holes and collisions between ultra-dense stars at the ends of their lives.
Problems began for the observatory in 2024, during a period of intense solar activity. All satellites in low Earth orbit slowly lose altitude because of atmospheric drag. But when the sun’s activity ramps up, it heats Earth’s atmosphere, which increases drag and can cause orbits to decay precipitously.
In 2025, NASA awarded a $30 million contract to Katalyst to build the LINK spacecraft and attempt a daring rescue.
“We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way,” Ghonhee Lee, CEO of Katalyst Space, said in a statement Wednesday. “We have already learned a tremendous amount, and now our job is to turn those lessons into something durable — building a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing.”
Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the astrophysics division at NASA headquarters, said in a statement that the mission was “a first-of-its kind attempt, developed on an unprecedented timeline driven by the Sun’s activity.”
Isaacman said that despite having to abandon the boost attempt, the mission will provide valuable lessons for future satellite servicing operations in space — a much-needed capability as both NASA and commercial space companies ramp up activity in low Earth orbit and beyond.
“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did,” Isaacman said.
