In the long story of humanity reaching beyond its atmosphere, even missions that stumble carry the seeds of future mastery. NASA and Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft, launched in July to rescue the 21-year-old Swift Observatory from orbital decay, suffered an attitude control failure that made physical capture impossible — yet both agencies have chosen to press forward with proximity operations, gathering the hard-won data that only real-world attempts can provide. Swift, a gamma-ray observatory that outlived its intended lifespan by nearly two decades, will likely re-enter Earth's atmosphere