15 Facts About Kliper

Kliper was an early-2000s proposed partially-reusable crewed spacecraft concept by RSC Energia.

Kliper was intended to be designed to be able to carry up to six people and to perform ferry services between Earth and the International Space Station.

Kliper had been developed since 2000 and reportedly relied heavily on research studies as well as proposals for a small Russian lifting body spacecraft from the 1990s.

In 2005 Kliper was displayed in several air shows around Europe and Asia, in order to recruit international partners to co-fund and co-develop the spacecraft.

Vladimir Taneev, the leading designer of the Kliper system, speculated on the contribution of Europe to the project in the following way:.

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In 2004 it was announced that it was likely that Kliper would make its first launch as early as 2010 or 2011, the same time the Space Shuttle was scheduled to be retired.

In concluding "We need two transportation systems in the world", Dordain outlined shortly after the European Space Summit that the primary requirement of Europe's involvement in the Kliper project was to rely on two separate systems to support the ISS as had been proven vital after the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster in 2003.

News reports in Russia indicated that Kliper was still expected to be ready for Russian Space Agency test flights around the year 2012.

Kliper said that Energia would spend more time on the project analysis, perform additional dynamic modeling, revise the design and appearance and then would come up with new proposals for Roscosmos.

Kliper mentioned two possible options: a space capsule, better for missions to the Moon and Mars, and a lifting body design for low Earth orbit missions.

Kliper's design was another attempt to solve the geometric problems of spacecraft.

Kliper was designed with the Orbital Module below its reentry module, and the docking mechanism below that.

On return from space, Kliper's lifting body design would not only allow a smoother descent into Earth's atmosphere than the capsule design, such as Soyuz; but permit control.

Kliper program was proposed as the Russian-European counterpart to the American Orion Spacecraft and was therefore designed to be part of a modular system that enabled it to be both a LEO-shuttle type vehicle as well as part of a spacecraft able to go beyond Earth orbit to the Moon and even Mars .

Until late 2005 it was much more likely that Kliper would have used an Angara-A3 rocket, which was scheduled to make its first launch in 2012 or possibly a Zenit rocket that is built in Ukraine.