Lifting Body Spaceplane With no Wings Looks Like a Bullet Fired in a Russian Roulette

America's efforts in designing a reusable spacecraft ended with the creation of the Space Shuttle, an aircraft-like machine that launched on a rocket, maneuvered using its own engines, and then glided down to land. It was a design that ultimately proved ideal for the task at hand, and even ended up being copied by the Russians for their never-launched Buran space shuttle.

But before settling on copying the American design, the people over at Soviet design bureau OKB-1, the same ones that gave birth to the Soyuz rocket family, had something else in mind. Something the world never got to know: the MTKVA.

Unlike the space shuttle, which came as a central body with wings, the Russian idea was a lifting body design with no such things, that was deemed more appropriate for a light and strong reusable space transporter for crews.

It too would launch on top of a rocket, in this case the Vulkan. The bullet-shaped spacecraft had a conical crew cabin on its tip, a cylindrical section behind that, and the engine section at the rear.

Thanks to these engines and its shape the MTKVA would have been capable of performing high angles of bank at hypersonic speeds, but more importantly than that it would have been capable of cross-range maneuvering. This technically meant the spacecraft would have been capable of landing on Soviet soil from pretty much any orbit.

The return to Earth would have been performed in glide mode, just like the American Space Shuttle, but the final approach would have relied on parachutes. The thing would thus have landed vertically, aided in doing so by retro boosters.

The design was proposed by OKB-1 in the mid-1970s as a spacecraft capable of carrying 176,000 pounds (80 tons) of payload.

For reasons that had to do with politics more than anything else, the MTKVA idea was ultimately rejected and the Buran Space Shuttle copycat was chosen instead. As it turned out, it wasn't the brightest of ideas, as the Buran never got to do what it was intended for (it only flew once, with no people on board), and the MTKVA was never made.

Yet here we are, having a look at how the MTKVA would have looked like in flight, thanks to animation specialist Hazegrayart, in a six-minute computer-generated video of the spacecraft performing its duties.