FROM THE EDITOR

Between 1994 and 1995 a man lived in space, aboard the Mir Space Station, for 438 consecutive days – the most anyone has spent in low-Earth orbit. To me, that’s an unimaginable amount of time to spend locked in a capsule spinning around the Earth at just under 28,000km/h. But for Valery Polyakov, it didn’t seem like a big deal, at least that’s what the history books say. Polyakov, a physician who had been studying the effects of spaceflight on the human body, had volunteered for the mission to find out what the consequences of longer term spaceflight might be. He was keen to find out how realistic a goal a mission to Mars might be.

It turns out Valery was made of some pretty tough stuff, experiencing few unexpected side effects and noting only that his mood was affected for the first few days aboard the space station. As if to show that the body could overcome the perils of long periods in space, Polyakov would exercise for two hours a day. When he landed, keen to prove a point, he lifted himself out of the Soyuz landing craft and walked over to the medics waiting for him – most astronauts’ muscles waste away after living gravity-free for a few hundred days – which earned himself the nickname ‘the ironman of spaceflight’. Today, it seems like that the extended missions Polyakov envisioned will soon become a reality. Space agencies are plotting landing sites on the Moon, and from there it’s a short hop (okay, maybe not that short) to Mars. In this issue we look at how our biology, and that of the plants and animals we’ll have to bring with us, will survive on other worlds.