Briggs Aerospace Technologies
 

Varulkarie program

Varulkarie is a program designed to remove space-debris from orbit at high rates, and will be funded by the Briggs J2000 HYT programme.

NASA tracks over 22,000 pieces of debris in orbit larger than 10 cm, and claims 100 million pieces of debris are in orbit. Space debris, mainly formed from discarded elements from rockets remaining in orbit, is a severe threat to the space industry. A collision could destroy a spacecraft, and the number of pieces of space debris is multiplying, from ongoing use of rockets as well as debris collisions with other space-junk, creating more litter.

Space debris was seen by Briggs as an unchecked, severe problem a decade ago. The predecessors of the present programs originated from an engineering program, meant to be sub-contracted to other aerospace firms, except Briggs found appropriate designs internally. 

Continued work by Briggs has developed multiple programs to remove all shapes and sizes of space junk from different orbits. There are now three Briggs designs and processes to remove space debris. 

  1. The J2000 will remove obsolete satellites and other valuable debris from orbit. 
  2. Briggs has also designed an unmanned, robotic craft to remove litter piece by piece - particularly good for removing larger pieces of unrecyclable rubbish from orbit. 
  3. The third type uses HYTs equipped with armoured deflectors to reduce the problem. This system will remove large numbers of smaller space debris from orbit, by flying into the debris, deflecting it out of orbit and back to Earth.

J2000 HYT missions

HYTs will be employed capturing obsolete satellites and bringing them back to Earth for recycling. The missions will simply involve HYTs ascending up to orbit and intercepting the satellites, possibly several in one mission, and returning to Earth.

Due to the low cost of J2000 operations, this mission may even pay for itself since most satellites have expensive fittings, such as gold and other rare metals.

Unmanned semi-robotic craft

The unmanned semi-robotic craft has been developed to be carried in the J2000 payload bay along with smaller than full payloads. this enables the robotic craft to be carried into orbit for clearing missions if there is room in the payload bay.

The unmanned craft will be equipped with detection gear and intercept larger pieces of debris. Using an unmanned craft removed the severe danger of these (interception) services. It will be deployed by a HYT at high orbit and descend down through various orbital inclines capturing space debris. Once the craft reaches low orbit it re-enters back to Earth for landing.The craft will be remotely operated from Earth. 

The design is based upon studies to find an escape-craft for the HYT crews, as well a former engineering program by Briggs predecessor Briggs Aerospace Technologies.

Deflectors

The deflection system pushes the debris back to Earth via large armoured wings linked between several J2000s. 

This system is designed to quickly remove small pieces of space debris from all orbital altitudes, which albeit being tiny, can be deadly to any spacecraft, particularly manned missions. The wings give a large area of coverage, enabling a lot of space debris to be vectored back to Earth in a very short time.

These armoured wings will fold up for travel in a HYT into orbit, when it will be placed into high orbit. Once the craft has been readied for use - with the wings unfolded - the linked HYTs will move forward towards known debris.

The deflectors push the pieces of litter back into orbit, where it will burn up upon re-entry. Each panel is armoured so as to cope with the extremely high impact velocities of some of the debris. Due to the angle much of the energy is taken out of the impact deflecting the object back to Earth, like a bat hitting a ball. Even collsions with large debris will reduce the velocity of the debris enough to drop it out of orbit.

Fortunately space debris is travelling - for the most part - in the same direction, reducing the impact speeds to (generally speaking) the speed of the Varulkarie: the pieces are in orbit and thereby at orbital velocity. The pieces are all travelling in the same direction, due to rocketries need to be launched against the rotation of the Earth for improved performance.

The HYTs on these missions will return to Earth as normal, with the deflectors refolded and stored inside in the payload bay. The deflectors are designed to be refolded or can be ejected if necessary: damage due to the collisions may make the panels unable to be retracted. If ejected, the panels are designed to flutter down and be reusable, just prior to atmospheric re-entry: in other words, they will not create more mess than they clean.

The panels will be serviced and repaired before another mission.


 
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