Mileage Factor?

The National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) has a lot of old satellites hanging out in "retirement" orbits where they are unlikely to collide with currently used or inhabited hardware like communications satellites and the International Space Station. Often those orbits are designed so that the unused craft will eventually re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.

But the agency recently signed over the rights to one old satellite to a private group that intends to try to use it for new missions. If the group can communicate with and take control of the satellite, NASA will let them use it for their own experiments.

This could be interesting, and if it pans out would be worth pursuing on a larger scale. Since NASA itself can't actually put people in space anymore, farming more and more pieces of itself to people who are still interested in the universe beyond our world might be a good idea.