ITALY TO INVEST 40 MILLION EURO IN JOINT PROJECT WITH RUSSIA TO SIMULATE  SPACE FLIGHTS

        A consortium of 20 Italian universities and industrial companies intends to invest 40 million Euro in a joint experiment with Russia to imitate several manned space flights to other planets.
        Japan, France, Germany also have been interested  to take part in this joint project with Russia. On the basis of the common technological know-how new technologies will be developed  not only for scientific purposes in a space flight but  also for commercial goals.
         Preliminarily, representatives of the German, French and Italian space agencies have given their consent for participation in the project.

         The Institute of medico-biological problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences is acting as the experiment’s initiator. The project stipulates holding an isolation experiment in October 2017 and in 2018 for two or three weeks, four- and eight-month experiments in 2019 and an annual experiment in 2020-2021.
         The crew of the first experiment for isolation as part of preparations for flights to other planets may be international and involve the participation of a Japanese and a German volunteer.
         The Institute of Medico-Biological Problems and NASA earlier agreed to hold a series of joint isolation experiments to study the psychology and the working capacity of human being in long space flights. The experiments will be held in the Institute’s ground experimental complex from 2017 to 2021.
         The Institute of Medico-Biological Problems has held several dozen similar experiments since 1967, the most famous of which include A Year in Spaceship (1967-1968), HUBES (1994), EKOPSY (1995), SFINCSS (2000), Mars-500 (2007-2011). The Mars-500 project imitated a flight to the Red Planet and lasted 520 days. A special ground complex was set up for this purpose.
More information: http://tass.com/science/929163