A commercial spacecraft tried to save NASA's Swift telescope. The boost is off, the data isn't.

A commercial spacecraft built to give NASA's aging Swift space telescope a longer life will not, after all, push it to a higher orbit. NASA and Katalyst Space said Wednesday that an attitude-control problem on the company's two-week-old LINK servicing vehicle has ended the boost portion of the mission, the first commercial attempt to extend a NASA astrophysics observatory in orbit.

The Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray space telescope launched in 2004, will still face the same end-of-life clock it was always on: without a successful boost, NASA expects it to re-enter Earth's atmosphere later this year, closing out more than two decades of science. The mission was driven by the Sun's activity cycle, which is accelerating Swift's orbital decay, rather than a routine servicing schedule.

What remains is a closer test. LINK will still attempt rendezvous and proximity operations, in plain terms flying close to and maneuvering around Swift, even though it will not capture or nudge the telescope. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has framed the program as a deliberate bet to move quickly and take smart risks on commercial servicing, and agency officials are now casting the trimmed mission as a dress rehearsal for the next flight rather than a rescue.

That framing depends on what happens in the next several days. The RPO attempt has not been completed, and any independent engineering assessment of the attitude-control fault has not been published. If the close-approach test also fails, the commercial-vendor pitch NASA is building on this flight will have to be made on weaker ground.