Space engineering entered a transformative new era today as researchers announced that an autonomous robot built at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has successfully assembled a structural component in orbit. Operating hundreds of miles above Earth under DARPA’s NOM4D program, the ASTRA experiment overcame strict communication windows to construct an antenna assembly. This historic achievement proves that giant telescopes, massive communications arrays, and orbital solar power stations can be fabricated directly in space rather than being constrained by the payload fairing limits of conventional rockets.
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