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Kliper is a spacecraft proposed in 2004 by Russian rocket and space company RKK Energia. Designed in the first place to replace the Soyuz, it is a reusable space plane without wings that glides into the atmosphere at an angle that produces much less acceleration on the human occupants than the current Soyuz. The craft can carry up to seven people and can be used for ferry services between earth and the International Space Station, or for providing paying tourists short trips in orbit.
Its design is another attempt to solve the geometric problems of spacecraft design. Soyuz had an Orbital Module, a hollow sphere, to be used for eating and hygiene, and as an airlock, located above the reentry module (the capsule), with the docking mechanism at the top. In the event of an emergency, it would have to be lifted away from the rocket along with the reentry module, and the fairing over the spacecraft would had to be designed to successfully split apart either circumferentially just below the reentry module in such an emergency or longitudinally like a banana were the flight successful. Kliper has the Orbital Module below its reentry module, and the docking mechanism below that. This is made possible by having the reentry module wider than the orbital module, so that a pair of rocket nozzles for orbital maneuvering can be fitted alongside it, as the later Salyut space stations had. No American spacecraft had anything like the Orbital Module, except for the Docking Module of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which was stored separately.
The lifting body design would not only allow a smoother descent into earth's atmosphere, it would also allow some steering. RKK Energia claims the craft would be able to land in a pre-determined one square kilometer area. The Russians have not released images that would enable its capacities as a lifting body to be determined, however. It looks like a cylinder topped by a cone.
Its projected lifespan is 25 flights.
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