On the edge of the main road connecting Denver to Boulder, a space startup’s manufacturing facility in Broomfield has been racing against the clock for a once-in-a-lifetime mission.

In a span of eight months, Katalyst Space Technologies has taken a napkin sketch of a concept and built a robotic spacecraft called Link to save the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — NASA’s tool to study the universe’s most powerful explosions — from burning up in Earth’s atmosphere in late 2026.

The company’s staff began packing up the spacecraft and saying their farewells ahead of the planned shipment to NASA in the coming days.

After passing testing and a launch date planned for June, Katalyst’s specialized robotic spacecraft will be onboard Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus rocket to find the observatory, grab hold of it while it’s tumbling and boost it into a higher orbit position to preserve its valuable scientific instruments.

Doing so would be a milestone achievement that even NASA considers incredibly difficult.

It’s a “fast, high-risk, high-reward mission,” said John Van Eepoel, Swift’s mission director at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, in a news release.

Mission faces many challenges

The Swift Observatory, launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, is rapidly falling out of orbit.

Many aging satellites decay over time, but NASA said the sun’s increased activity has sped up the decay much faster than anticipated. Replacing the observatory, which originally cost $500 million to build, would be incredibly expensive, and saving it could keep it in commission for longer. It’s also the cheaper option.

Over the last two decades, the observatory that was born in the basement of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park has studied eruptions in other galaxies, exploding stars, comets, asteroids, and even lightning storms on Earth by leading a fleet of telescopes to look deeper into events across the universe.

Most recently, it helped scientists for the first time find signals of two monster black holes ripping apart a massive gas cloud.

Katalyst — an Arizona-based aerospace company that has set up a majority of its infrastructure in the metro Denver region after acquiring Atomos Space last year — beat a team including Denver’s Astroscale U.S. to win the $30 million contract for the attempt to save the Swift Observatory.

There’s never been a mission like it, or even quite possible, until now.

The Swift Observatory was launched at a time when spacecraft weren’t designed to have their life extended after orbital decay. As low Earth orbit has become increasingly cluttered with satellites and debris amidst the commercial space boom, finding ways to preserve satellites in space longer has become a growing market.

Newer satellites increasingly have attachments or interfaces designed to work with fleets of robotic spacecraft to refuel, move their orbital position or assemble additional parts.

Katalyst’s team has to figure out how to closely approach an observatory that has no built-in attachments for this purpose and grab onto it delicately without impacting its scientific instruments. The company also has no idea what position the observatory will be in, Andrew Thompson, Katalyst’s vice president of operations, told The Denver Gazette.

“You don’t know how it could be tumbling. In order to be able to grab hold of a tumbling spacecraft, you have to be able to match that tumble just right and then get close and then grab it very gently,” he said. “That’s incredibly complex.”

In its manufacturing facility in Broomfield, the team has two life-size mockups of the bottom of the observatory spanning 5 feet tall, including one on an anti-gravity floorboard.

Because there were no photographs taken of that part of the observatory before it launched, the team had to base its copycat on design schematics, meaning it was flying blind on any potential changes made in later stages.

With the reality that this mission could fail, Thompson said there are many ways it could still be trailblazing for the aerospace industry.

Just getting close enough to the tumbling observatory is a feat in itself.

“This isn’t a binary success or fail,” Thompson said. “If we get it all the way up to where it wants to be, we’re still blazing a trail that nobody else has done before.”

A game changer for the space industry?

Winning the contract was itself a big win.

NASA has routinely given contracts to legacy companies like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman for missions that require a lot of time and planning. But because of the urgency of the situation, Thompson said it shows how NASA is becoming more willing to work with startups that can be nimble and creative.

The mission also opened “quite a few doors” for Katalyst to find potential clients as it aims to build a fleet of robotic spacecraft that can perform maintenance or other jobs as if it were an AAA service in space at a lower price than sending up a new satellite, he said.

“People can look at this and say, ‘Oh, this is actually a viable option for me,’” said Sarah Bradley, director of operations at Katalyst.
”I don’t have to pay these exorbitant amounts of dollars, where I might as well just replace my spacecraft. This mission causes an entire shift in the industry.”

While the company is headquartered in Arizona and has a team in Washington, D.C., nearly 90% of its staff is in Colorado.

After acquiring Atomos Space in 2025, Bradley said Katalyst plans to make Colorado its base for manufacturing and testing. The company also built its mission control facility in Broomfield to operate Link when it goes to space for the rescue.

Overall, Thompson said they have a “high degree of confidence” in completing the mission. Grabbing hold of it and boosting will be the most difficult part.

“There’s a lot of unknowns right now,” he said. “So, until we get up there, it’s just going to be hard to tell.”