The concept has been put forward by ATK from the US and Astrium from Europe.
We would also like to thank Astrium and Vietnam for placing their trust in us.
Astrium, Europe's biggest space company and prime contractor on the ATV, will be leading the feasibility work.
"The market is there, " said Robert Laine, chief technical officer of EADS Astrium.
The satellite is intended for Earth observations to assist with scientific research, and will be constructed by Astrium.
The Astrium UK harpoon concept is being presented to the 63rd International Astronautical Congress in Naples on Wednesday.
"Pleiades is equipped with control moment gyros, " explained Charlotte Gabriel Robez, the Pleiades project manager with Astrium Geo-information Services.
The satellites were made by an industrial consortium featuring Europe's two heavyweight space companies - Astrium and Thales Alenia Space (TAS).
At the Paris Air Show this week, I spent some time talking with Alain Charmeau, the CEO of Astrium Space Transportation.
The feasibility studies on this new rocket are being led by Astrium Space Transportation, which is also the prime contractor on the current vehicle.
With Lockheed Martin and Europe's biggest space company, Astrium, also involved - the consortium had appeared to be a strong contender for CCiCap support.
Esa is expected to sign a formal contract with Astrium (Bremen, Germany) in the coming days to lead the production of the service module.
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We are very pleased to be working once more with Astrium, after having launched five of their satellites during the last four months of 2012.
The UK Space Agency, through its membership of Esa, is now arguing strongly for the Astrium autonomous navigation system to be incorporated into the 2018 rover.
In 10-15 years Astrium hopes it will be possible to deploy a complete, small-scale orbiting power station producing significantly more than that from its own solar cells.
Astrium's role, at its UK centre in Portsmouth, was to integrate all the payload components, including hydrogen-maser atomic clocks, the ultra-precise time-pieces on which Galileo's performance depends.
Whether the Astrium system will remain a specialised novelty or will be the forerunner of something more like the cosmic power stations of Asimov's imagination is anybody's guess.
Astrium Bremen is in sole charge of manufacturing Johannes Kepler.
But ATK and Astrium believe their experience means they could have the 90m-high (300ft) Liberty rocket ready to fly by 2013, and operational with astronauts on board by 2015.
EADS-Astrium is currently working on a portable van, which has a satellite link, GSM, and wi-fi capabilities to be deployed during emergencies, such as in the aftermath of natural disasters.
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The issue is now being studied at the ATV control room in Toulouse, France, and at prime contractor EADS Astrium's Functional Simulation Facility at Les Mureaux north west of Paris.
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Dr Sweeney's team, working in collaboration with Astrium, a satellite-and-space company that is part of EADS, a European aerospace group, will test the system in a large aircraft hangar in Germany.
EADS-Astrium is about to launch its first SDR product, a piece of kit to be used by the military that can convert different kinds of signals, but Mr Kinsella said it was still an emerging technology.
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But the executives at Astrium are concerned that after having done the groundwork in developing the vehicle systems (the chassis, locomotion and navigation systems), the company might actually lose the opportunity to build the final flight vehicle.
Dr Ralph Cordey, who is EADS Astrium's head of exploration and business, told BBC News that the concept of a gravity tug was actually first mooted by two Nasa astronauts, Edward Lu and Stanley Love, a few years ago.
The Astrium company at its Stevenage and Portsmouth centres has benefited most from this investment, and has become one of the world's leading suppliers of all those spacecraft up there that relay TV and phone calls around the globe.
And last year, European aerospace giant EADS announced plans for its Astrium space division to develop a line of suborbital jets to satisfy a space tourism market that it predicts could grow to as many as 15, 000 passengers a year by 2020.
Astrium's plan to tackle defunct satellites is to use an unmanned chase spacecraft to get in range, fire a barbed harpoon into the body of the rogue hardware and then use a smaller propulsion unit attached to a tether to tow it back towards the atmosphere where it will burn up safely on re-entry.
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