Kliper - Carrier Rockets

Carrier Rockets

The present Soyuz rocket would not be able to lift Kliper into low earth orbit, because the spacecraft (the version designed without Parom) was expected to weigh between 13 and 14.5 metric tons (with payload and crew) whereas Soyuz only has a lifting capacity of around 8 metric tons. It was originally planned to heavily enhance the Soyuz rocket - a project that was labelled the Onega rocket or Soyuz-3. Until fall of 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 (however the Angara program has been delayed and Angara-A3 may not be developed in light of the funding of the development of Soyuz 2-3) or possibly a Zenit rocket that is built in Ukraine.

At the end of 2005, Kliper's design was changed again (as outlined above) and the most likely solution for a carrier rocket became the Soyuz 2-3, an upgraded Soyuz 2 rocket. This enhanced Soyuz should have been able to launch Kliper into space because of weight reduction resulting in the use of the Parom as a space tug.

With regard to launch sites for Kliper, further information became available as of October 2005, with a planning-stage declaration from Nikolai Moiseev, Deputy Director of the Russian Space Agency that Kliper could have been launched from ESA's Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana. Though this aim had already been suggested, the comment was made in the context of facility upgrades for Kourou that are already under way since 2003 and are expected to be finished in 2007 with the first launch of a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana in 2008. It had been suggested that Kliper could have been launched from both Baikonur and Kourou, by Alan Thirkettle, head of ESA's human spaceflight, microgravity and exploration directorate, in December 2005.