Honestly, I don’t know how they’ll cope.
A crew of Russian women will spend eight days in a mock space craft to test their suitability for an all-female trip to the moon in 2029.
The six volunteers include scientific researchers, a doctor and a psychologist, so naturally, during a press conference to discuss the experiment, they were asked how they’d cope without men and make-up for a week and a day.
One of the fearless participants, Anna Kussmaul, generously bothered to reply that they weren’t the slightest bit concerned.
“Those who will take part in an experiment are not concerned there won’t be any men in their crew,” she said.
“We are here to do our job and we don’t have time to think about men.
“We are doing work. When you’re doing your work, you don’t think about men and women.”
Her colleague, Darya Komissarova, simply stated: “We are very beautiful without make-up.”
The women will valiantly spend the duration of their mission in a man-free utopia inside Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems or, more accurately, in a wooden panelled suite of rooms performing a range of experiments covering psychology and human biology.
One of the experiment’s supervisors, Sergei Ponomaryov, explained that they trying to establish how an all female crew would communicate during a flight to the moon and back.
“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,” he said.
One small step for woman, a giant leap for woman kind.