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…
