Six Russian women have climbed into a spaceship mock-up to test how an all-female crew would interact on a round-trip mission to the moon.
The women, all volunteers, will spend 8 days in a small suite of rooms at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, known for its studies on the physical and psychological effect on humans of space travel.
A similar experiment in 2010 saw six international volunteers - all male, in this instance - locked into a similar environment for 520 days to simulate a mission to Mars and back.
The new project will help Russian women catch up after almost 40 years of male-dominated space activities, officials said, which included long-term stays aboard the International Space Station for male cosmonauts.
"There's never been an all-female crew on the ISS," said the supervisor of the experiment, Sergei Ponomaryov. "We consider the future of space belongs equally to men and women and unfortunately we need to catch up a bit after a period when unfortunately there haven't been too many women in space."
Russia is reported to be considering a manned - scratch that, crewed - mission to the moon in 2029, with a spacecraft for the mission already under construction and aiming for a first test flight in 2021.
"It will be interesting to see how well [the women] get on with each other, and how well they are able to perform tasks," Ponomaryov says. "We believe women might not only be no worse than men at performing certain tasks in space, but actually better."
The six women in the test, all of whom have a background in either biophysics or medicine, were narrowed down from a field of candidates after weeks of rigorous testing.
During the simulated flight, the crew is expected to conduct around 30 scientific experiments.
Doctors and psychologists will monitor the crew around the clock, using cameras installed in the mock spacecraft.
The volunteer crew also includes a doctor and a psychologist.
The experiment would be particularly interesting in terms of psychology, institute director Igor Ushakov said.
"I'd like to wish you a lack of conflicts, even though they say that in one kitchen, two housewives find it hard to live together," he said.
Russia sent the first woman into space in 1963 when Valentina Tereshkova orbited the earth, but sent its fourth female cosmonaut, Yelena Serova, into space just last year.
