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Russia Picks Space-Pod Team for 520-Day Moscow ‘Voyage’ to Mars

May 18, 2010, 9:37 AM EDT

By Ilya Arkhipov

May 18 (Bloomberg) -- Russia’s space agency identified the team it plans to lock in a Moscow pod complex for 520 days to simulate a mission to Mars, an experiment officials said is the most thorough test of man’s suitability for interplanetary travel yet devised.

Three Russians, two Europeans and a Chinese will enter a 1,750 square-meter (18,800-square-foot), five-module complex on June 3 and seek to live there in isolation for 17 months, said Mark Belakovsky, deputy head of the Mars-500 project.

More than 6,000 people from 40 countries applied to join the $15 million test of psychological and physiological effects of long-term confinement, Belakovsky said in an interview in Moscow today after he announced the finalists for the mission. One of the four Russians to make the seven-man cut will serve as a replacement in case someone drops out.

Russia, which sent the first satellite and man into space, is rebuilding a space program whose budget was decimated by the economic chaos that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, has signed accords on a range of projects with counterparts in the U.S., European Union and China in recent years and may explore the moon together with India, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in March.

The six-man crew of the Mars-500 project, which is partly funded by the European Space Agency, will spend the first 250 days in a mock spaceship to replicate the amount of time it would take to reach Mars with current technology. After reaching the planet, three crewmembers will spend 30 days “exploring and colonizing” the planet before returning to the ship for the 240-day flight home, Belakovsky said.

The 520-day confinement is the culminating stage of a three-part project that was first proposed more than a decade ago. Six-man crews spent two weeks in the complex in 2007 and 105 days last year. None of those crewmembers applied to participate in the experiment that starts next month.

The Russian crew includes engineers Alexei Sitev and Mikhail Sinelnikov, surgeon Sukhrob Kamolov and physiologist Alexander Smoleevsky. They’ll be joined by Chinese cosmonaut trainer Wang Yue, Italian engineer Diego Urbina and French engineer Romain Charles. Each of them will earn at least 80,000 euros ($99,000) for their efforts.

The results of the experiment will form a part of a 10-year funding plan for the space industry that Russia’s government is scheduled to approve in 2015, said Alexander Zheleznyakov, a Mars expert at the Russian Academy of Space Exploration in Moscow, by phone.

“Mars is the main goal that every space nation is trying to achieve,” Zheleznyakov said.

--With reporting by Anastasia Ustinova in Moscow. Editors: Brad Cook, Brad Cook.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ilya Arkhipov in Moscow at iarkhipov@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brad Cook at bcook7@bloomberg.net

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