Theoretical Future News is a look at a possible future of where science and technology might go

Here on Earth, if someone offered a service where your cellphone always had charge, but you would always be under a 30 foot diameter umbrella most of us would reasonably say no thanks. For satellite operators many would say yes. Breksta* Technologies is one of the latest entrants in the world of Satellites as a Service/Platform. Based on research out of University Southern California, Breksta was developed to simplify one of the more annoying requirements for smaller space-craft design, heat and power management. For a traditional small form factor satellite, engineers must carefully balance desired scientific goals against their ability to generate electricity and getting rid of unnecessary heat.

An artist’s render of what the Breksta Mothership might look like

Breksta works by offloading power production from the client’s satellite by producing power on a separate power generating space-craft designed to then share that power with client space-craft. This power sharing functionality provided a unique design opportunity to the development team. For small space craft like cube-sats engineers would have to choose between power generation and heat control. The Breksta team realized that by eliminating the traditional solar panels on companion satellites, the surface area used for providing power can instead be used as a radiator.

With funding from NASA and private investors a test version of the Breksta Mother Ship will be sent up with the Fall ISS resupply mission. Over the next 2 years the team will have a range of test satellites will hide in the shadow of the mothership which will orbit 250 meters behind the station. Companion satellites will provide data to teams here on Earth. If everything goes well researchers believe that within the decade an even cheaper category of cube-sats will expand the satellite market

*Breksta is a Twilight Goddess from Lithuanian mythology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_night_deities

Back to the Present

This idea came about from an idea about designing future space missions, but as the writing was getting weird this is what came about for what narrative I could make feel “natural”

The idea behind Breksta is on the surface reasonable. Small spacecraft do have to worry about thermal management and balancing power production against launch mass. I don’t know if what I proposed above would make financial sense. The way I would see a firm like Breksta making money is by selling power capacity and mass savings to perspective clients. There might also be a possibility of the mothership also selling bandwidth to client satellites. Whether the revenue from clients would add up to be enough to make this a business idea is just hard to know at this time.

One thing that I think helps make the case for Breksta is its ability to increase the lifespan of the cube-sat. Many cube-sats are built under the premise that they will only stay in orbit for small time (a little over a year) By having a mothership, especially one that might be routinely rendezvoused with, there is a possibility that the cube sats could get a longer life span. On the flip side it could be that cube-sat operators generally just want to be stand alone and allow their vehicles to burn up sooner than later.

With respect to the ability to share power and benefits of shading, at least on that point the physics/engineering is there. Many space-craft will actually deploy what are called sun-shades to limit how much time the space-craft must directly face sunlight. By being in shadow the space-craft’s radiators are able to operate more continuously. By being able to run the cooling system for longer in tandem with reduced thermal gain engineers are likely to get into a virtuous cycle of mass reduction.

On the power sharing front, there is a reason I didn’t explicitly mention one solution for sharing power over another. Basically there are too many nuanced pros and cons for me to properly account for in a simple-ish blog post. Power can either be shared through a physical connection or some form of wireless transfer. A physical connection has the benefit of being very efficient. The trade off for physical connections is limiting the physical proximity between mothership and smaller satellites. Generally speaking there is no physics that says wireless power transfer in space isn’t possible, and for the moment that’s good enough.

Breksta could be built several ways, as a single large vehicle deployed in a single launch, several mechanically simple elements assembled together form multiple launches, or a swarm of small drones working together to ensure there is always a shadow. (the last one is the most sci-fi, aka least probable in the near term)

The design I made for this post is mostly in the category of I thought it would look cool, whether a real mothership would look anything like this is hard for me to say. That being said, here’s why my design looks the way it does (by my internal no math done rationals).

The black panels are the solar panels meant for power production, why 6, because I am under the impression that hexagonal patterns still look futuristic sci-fi.

The Red Elements are the radiators for the mothership’s primary cooling system. Red was chosen to provide visual distinctiveness.

The larger silver dish element is in fact 4 disks of reflective materials. The disks are configured as pairs of counter rotating ultralight sheets. My thought behind the counter rotating sheets is to help maintain shadow after micro meteorites. If you had just a single reflective layer and a piece of debris hit it, well now you’ve got a hole for light to sneak through which will make science harder. (If someone asks for a visual explanation on how this would work I am happy to make it, but otherwise I want to be a bit lazy)

Another reason behind the reflective material being behind the solar panels is in the hopes of also increasing the power output of the solar panels, potentially reducing how much launch mass is devoted to solar panels.

One version of the counter-rotating disks that I did not include in this render (I am including this so I don’t forget the idea)

Instead of the disks being a singular skirt of reflective material, they might be made from a number of small sheets that unfurl as a result of the artificial spin, this feature would be if the mothership was intended to be used for a very long time, and so as elements got too damaged they could automatically be swapped out.

Power distribution is not a black box on the render, it is in fact that grey box near the back of the model. Currently I have no deep details to share about the design right now

I hope this idea was interesting, if you have any questions, feedback, please leave a comment.

Getting Shade from your Mother(ship) TFN