Two commercial satellites have completed an undocking maneuver high above Earth, signaling the successful end to a pioneering spacecraft life-extension mission. The Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1), developed by Northrop Grumman Corporation’s Space Logistics LLC, docked with Intelsat’s IS-901 communications satellite in 2020 in a graveyard orbit, a few hundred miles above geosynchronous orbit (GEO), an orbital belt 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth. MEV-1, which launched atop a Russian Proton rocket in October 2019 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, then brought IS-901 back to GEO and allowed it to restart its operations. But now, after extending the life of IS-901…