Robots will be one of the keys to the expanding in-space economy. As launch costs decrease—hopefully significantly when Starship and other massive lift systems come online—the most significant barrier to entry for the space economy will finally come down.

So what happens then? Two acronyms have been popping up in the literature with increasing frequency—in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing (ISAM) and On-orbit servicing (OOS). Over a series of articles, we'll look at some papers detailing what those acronyms mean and where they might be going shortly. First, we'll examine how robots fit into the equation.

Space robots have been around since 1981 when the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System (SRMS) was launched with the space shuttle, whose astronauts then operated them.

On Feb. 10, 2009, disaster struck hundreds of miles above the Siberian Peninsula. That evening, a defunct Russian satellite orbiting Earth crashed into a communications satellite called Iridium 33 moving at a speed of thousands of miles per hour. Both spacecraft erupted into a rain of shrapnel, sending more than 1,800 chunks of debris spiraling around the globe.

No other spacecraft (or humans) were harmed, but for many aerospace engineers, the event was a sign of things to come. Space, it seemed, was getting crowded.

NASA estimates that about 23,000 chunks of debris the size of a softball or larger currently swirl through space. All that junk means that another collision like the one that destroyed Iridium 33 becomes increasingly likely every year—only this time, the fallout could be much worse.