A high-risk mission led by a startup in Colorado to save one of NASA’s important scientific instruments has failed. 

The U.S. space agency and Katalyst announced Wednesday the spacecraft sent to stop the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory from burning up in Earth’s atmosphere struggled with attitude control, the system in charge of orienting a spacecraft in the proper direction and thus cannot finish its mission. 

“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman in a news release. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting.”

The Swift Observatory, launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, is rapidly falling out of orbit.

Many aging satellites decay over time, but NASA said the sun’s increased activity has sped up the decay much faster than anticipated.

Replacing the observatory, which originally cost $500 million to build, would be incredibly expensive and saving it could keep it in commission for longer.

Over the last two decades, the observatory that was born in the basement of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park studied eruptions in other galaxies, exploding stars, comets, asteroids and even lightning storms on Earth by leading a fleet of telescopes to look deeper into events across the universe.

Most recently, it helped scientists for the first time find signals of two monster black holes ripping apart a massive gas cloud.

Katalyst — an Arizona-based aerospace company that has set up a majority of its infrastructure in the metro Denver region after acquiring Atomos Space last year — beat a team including Denver’s Astroscale U.S. to win the $30 million contract for the attempt to save the Swift Observatory. It built the Link spacecraft in its facility in Broomfield.

The mission was the first of its kind because the Swift Observatory was designed during a time period when spacecraft weren’t built to have their life extended after orbital decay. 

As low Earth orbit has become increasingly cluttered with satellites and debris amid the commercial space boom, finding ways to preserve satellites in space longer has become a growing market. Newer satellites increasingly have attachments or interfaces designed to work with fleets of robotic spacecraft to refuel, move their orbital position or assemble additional parts.

This mission was meant to attempt to prove old spacecraft can be reused too.

While the observatory is set to be burned up in Earth’s atmosphere later this year, NASA and Katalyst will still try to get close to the telescope to practice rendezvous and proximity operations. 

When The Denver Gazette visited its facility before the spacecraft was sent to NASA, Andrew Thompson, Katalyst’s vice president of operations, said just getting close to the tumbling observatory would be a feat in itself.

“We have already learned a tremendous amount, and now our job is to turn those lessons into something durable — building a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing,” Ghonhee Lee, CEO of Katalyst Space, said, in a release Wednesday.