High Altitude Airship "Berkut"

The HAA Berkut is a solar powered airship capable to keep its position over a certain place on a 20 - 23 km altitude. The Berkut can carry up to 1200 kg of various communication and surveillance equipment and supply it with electrical power. Geostationary performance (station keeping) enables to provide various communications, broadcasting and observation services to the territory of more than one million square kilometers. It covers any large metropolitan areas and such countries as France or United Kingdom! Unlike geostationary satellites, the HAA allows to repair, upgrade or replace the equipment every 3 - 4 months while the airship perform service landing. This stratospheric platform is expected to generate new earth observations at the local area (highly important for anti terrorism and anti smuggling missions). Also it will make possible ultra- high - speed data communications by portable terminals, and will be a new infrastructure for the new generation system of information and communications. Experts admit that the HAA can provide over 1000 times better the fixed broadband local access capacity of a geostationary satellite with the same frequency of a band, on bytes per second per square kilometers basis

The HAA Berkut is deigned in three version:

Berkut ET – for equatorial and tropical countries ;
Berkut ML– for middle geographical latitudes (30-45 deg.);
Berkut HL – for highest possible geographical latitude (45-60 deg.);

All three versions have the same performance and same basic technical approach. The highest latitude is (shorter day at winter time) the more solar cells and more batteries are required. Also the wind speed and power required for station keeping at the working altitude on equator almost 1.5 times less than on high latitudes. Therefore we designed three different envelopes with same max. Diameter but different length and volume. Same type of tail fins with electrical engines and large propellers are employed on all versions. Seven - for HL, five - for ML and three - for ET. Similar infrastructure is designed. That approach allows lowering development cost for every new version. The heart of the HAA is a power management system based on proven technical approach of famous Russian space craft manufacturers enriched by the best world experience.

Innovative launch and infrastructure technology enable our customer to assemble giant hangar for HAA Berkut at almost every place within one day! The hangar walls assembled of pressurized tubes. The tubes are composed in section, 30 m long each. Two sides of the hangar sections are locked to each other on the top of the hangar.
Unlocking them and pooling the sections allow assembling hangars 270, 210 and 180 m long for HL, ML and ET version correspondingly.