"We agree that there is a business case," Metzger told Seeker. "You can recover the capital investment and deliver the spacecraft at a cost savings and make a profit."
While the exact locations of the spacecraft network are being worked out, this is the bare bones of the proposal: Deep in space on a mission in a few decades' time, a mining spacecraft would head out to an asteroid and extract water from it (along with other materials and precious metals). Once its mission is complete, the mining spacecraft would come back to the Earth-moon system with the water on board.
A propellant depot somewhere near Earth would then accept the water. It would break down the water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen gas, which are both excellent rocket fuels. And this is the genius of the plan - space launch companies don't need launch fuel into space; the fuel is already there, waiting in the depot to refuel any spacecraft that requires it.
Now comes the space tug. Once a satellite is launched, the space tug nabs the satellite and brings it up to the propellant depot to pick up a load of fuel. Then the tug zooms up to geosynchronous orbit, where it releases the satellite to do its mission.
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With such a network in place, argues Sercel, we could greatly reduce the costs associated with our current method of sending satellites to high orbits and accessing deep space. Currently, if we want to break free of Earth's orbit, the only option we have is to launch a mission with everything we need on board -- all the fuel, the electronics, and in the future astronauts. With this space tug infrastructure, we at least don't need to launch huge quantities of fuel out of Earth's gravitational well.