Long-Duration Spaceflight Preparation Programs

Programs whose purpose was to prepare people and agencies for longer or more distant human spaceflight than they had yet attempted. MARS-500 was an isolation experiment in Moscow run by Russia, the European Space Agency and China that kept volunteer crews inside a mock-up spacecraft to rehearse a crewed flight to Mars, and Euromir sent European Space Agency astronauts to the Russian station Mir as precursor flights before the International Space Station. A program belongs here when its cited article presents it as preparation or rehearsal for later human missions rather than as a station or shuttle program in its own right. The groups for American, and for Soviet, Russian and Chinese, station programs hold the stations and orbiters themselves.