Six volunteers have agreed to participate in the Russian Mars 500 project simulating a flight to the Red planet. The simulation, being conducted in Moscow, started on Tuesday.

The group is taking part in a terrestrial experiment simulating manned flight to Mars, the second stage in preparations for a voyage which, up to now, has been the stuff of science-fiction.

But space flight is not always glamorous. To test the simulated flight module where the six will spend three months, six other volunteers previously spent a fortnight locked up in a tube.

Viktor Baranov, the Mars 500 Project lead scientist said, “I'm very pleased with the results of the first experiment. The reactions and results that we got were very important. Now we are waiting for the 105-day experiment. Then we will be even closer to reality.”

The current team is made up of four Russians, a French pilot and a military engineer from Germany, in a joint project between the Russian Space Agency and the Russian Academy of Science.

It's a bit like a high-tech Big Brother reality show, with the six to be watched 24-7 for over one hundred days.

But that's only less than half the time it would take to reach Mars by rocket, with a round trip taking over a year and a half.

“This was just the first experiment. And if we talk about the main work – it's only the beginning. We have plenty of things to work on and check,” notes cosmonaut and researcher Sergey Ryazansky.

The experiment will be carried out within five hermetically-sealed modules connected to each other. One is designed to replicate working conditions on the surface of the Red Planet.

But the detail of this experiment shows that a trip to Mars is no pie in the sky. The goal is to launch a first international mission to the planet by 2020.