Star Wars? MMA promotion announces plans to hold fights IN SPACE with the help of ex-SpaceX employees and rocket engineers

If you like your mixed martial arts unencumbered by the constraints of gravity then perhaps the newly-announced 'Galactic Combat' is for you, as an MMA league announces plans to hold fights in a spaceship orbiting the earth.

Entertainment company Space 11's veteran producer, Andrea Iervolino, has a long history of varied projects – and he seems to be seeking something out of this world for his next endeavor.

Iervolino has announced plans to produce a reality television series featuring 40 MMA fighters who will take part in an elimination tournament, with victorious participants earning the opportunity to fight in zero gravity in a specially designed capsule outside of the Earth's atmosphere.

"If you take UFC, it has a huge fan base," Iervolino said in a recent interview.

"My goal with this new format is – I don’t want to lose UFC fans, we need to embrace all of them, the whole MMA world – but the goal with Zero-G fighting is to make the concept much wider."

Plans for the ambitious concept will see the fighters train and compete with one another on Earth, with eight successful fighters then being blasted into space to fight inside a spacecraft as it travels around the Earth for 90 minutes.

Former UFC fighter John Lewis is attached to the project as Vice President and promoter for Galactic Combat, with pre-production planned ahead of a supposed 2023 launch date. 

"When people try to punch you in zero gravity – I don’t know if you’ve seen the video of a baby pushing a person [in zero gravity] and the person goes to the other side of the room," added Iervolino of his unique concept.

"It’s a totally different way to punch someone. It’s a very different type of training."

While the project, on the surface at least, appears to be an overly-ambitious one, Iervolino says that he has a crack team of scientists including a host of former SpaceX employees as well as rocket engineers, astrophysicists and astronomers.

"When we first started to work on Space 11, we were super quiet about it," he added.

"This one is doable. Having two guys fighting in a rocket orbiting the Earth is easy."