I think another possibility may be the repairing of friendly satellites and spying on enemy satellites. Flying up to an enemy satellite without interrupting it

I think another possibility may be the repairing of friendly satellites and spying on enemy satellites. Flying up to an enemy satellite without interrupting it may not break any treaties. The space shuttle was originally built with the intention to repair and launch spy satellites. This vehicle went into service around the same time the shuttle was being retired. Also, there may be some sort of metric being recorded that requires physical retrieval because of lack of bandwidth. Older satellites actually dumped film for later retrieval.