1. From the ground, you have no idea what is wrong with the satellite, whether or not the problem is fixable, and even if it is, what exact tooling/replacement parts need to be brought up.
2. Satellites are not designed to be easily taken apart.
3. Doing any kind of technical work in a spacesuit is incredibly difficult.
The extra cost of building your satellite with sufficient self-diagnostics, with a design that lets someone in a spacesuit take it apart and conduct meaningful repairs on it is going to be paid every single time you launch that satellite. This cost, in both design, and engineering is not trivial.
And the only time you'll ever get any value from it is if you go ahead and do another, even more expensive space launch - this time human-rated. This launch is likely to head on up, and discover that no, they don't have the right tools, replacement parts, or even ability to access the broken parts of the satellite.
The overwhelming cost of a satellite is the R&D that goes into designing it. If space launches are cheap, the correct economics to follow are "Just build two of them, and if the first one breaks, launch the second one."
1. From the ground, you have no idea what is wrong with the satellite, whether or not the problem is fixable, and even if it is, what exact tooling/replacement parts need to be brought up.
2. Satellites are not designed to be easily taken apart.
3. Doing any kind of technical work in a spacesuit is incredibly difficult.
The extra cost of building your satellite with sufficient self-diagnostics, with a design that lets someone in a spacesuit take it apart and conduct meaningful repairs on it is going to be paid every single time you launch that satellite. This cost, in both design, and engineering is not trivial.
And the only time you'll ever get any value from it is if you go ahead and do another, even more expensive space launch - this time human-rated. This launch is likely to head on up, and discover that no, they don't have the right tools, replacement parts, or even ability to access the broken parts of the satellite.
The overwhelming cost of a satellite is the R&D that goes into designing it. If space launches are cheap, the correct economics to follow are "Just build two of them, and if the first one breaks, launch the second one."