[NASA] LINK Spacecraft Set for Mission to Boost NASA’s Swift Observatory

[SpaceMan 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

A Katalyst engineer runs tests on LINK while the satellite is inside the Pegasus XL rocket attached to the Stargazer aircraft at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.

NASA/Ron Beard

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

to raise the orbit of

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

is poised for launch no earlier than Thursday, July 2, 5:09 a.m. EDT (9:09 p.m. UTC+12), from Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. A robotic servicing spacecraft called LINK, built by Katalyst Space, will blast into orbit on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket attached to the belly of the company’s Stargazer aircraft, shown here in this photograph from the evening of Tuesday, June 16, 2026. 

After launch, LINK will attempt to rendezvous with, grapple, and slowly raise Swift’s altitude over several months, preventing it from re-entering Earth’s atmosphere later this year. If this daring mission is successful, it will be the first time a commercial robotic mission has captured a NASA spacecraft that is both uncrewed and not originally designed to be serviced in space.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Image credit: NASA/Ron Beard

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up