Two volunteers cut off from the rest world for eight months stepped out on a mock-up of Mars on Monday, reaching the dramatic half-way point of their experimental "voyage" to the Red Planet. Outfitted in heavy white space suits and clunky boots, the Russian and Italian volunteers left their capsule and took their first careful steps on the red sands of Mars - all without ever leaving a Moscow research centre.
Grainy footage of their space walk, replete with crackly sound interference reminiscent of trips to the Moon, was watched live by top Russian and European space officials at Russia's real-life space control centre outside Moscow. "We have made great progress today," said Vitaly Davydov, the deputy head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, as dozens of journalists crowded around the surreal video feed.
"The crew feel fine," he added as the two men wobbled around what looked like a giant sandpit, massive backpacks that would have otherwise been filled with oxygen adding bulk to their shiny 32-kilogramme (71-pound) suits. The "Mars walk" marked a key moment in an unprecedented experiment during which six volunteers will spend 520 days in isolation to test how humans respond to the pressures of a there-and-back voyage to Mars.
After taking their first tentative steps, the crew planted the flags of Russia, the European Space Agency (ESA) and China and took soil samples in an experiment that Russia and Europe hope to repeat for real by 2040. But the planned 93-minute walk was cut short by 50 minutes, the Interfax news agency quoted a source close to the experiment as saying, without giving a reason.
Such details however seemed trivial amid the pomp of the event, with the crew dedicating their peculiar accomplishment to the upcoming 50th anniversary of man's first flight in space by Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin. But while Gagarin's feat came in the midst of a bitter confrontation between Moscow and Washington, Monday's experiment underscored the increasingly global nature of today's space exploration. Officially called Mars-500, the project joins six men from Europe, Russia and China in an experiment that focuses on the physical and psychological strains of extended space travel.