Cosmonautics. Start of the Russian Amazon (2014)

140th launch of the Soyuz spacecraft.

The crew of the Soyuz TMA-14M spacecraft (Elena Serova, Alexander Samokutyaev, Barry Wilmore) will work in orbit for 170 days.

Exactly the same number of days are left before the launch of the backup crew of the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft, which will embark on an annual flight.

Long-term flights are not made for the sake of records, they give scientists a lot of information, and doctors of space medicine can develop effective methods of maintaining the body in an unchanged state in the absence of gravity.

The work is being carried out with an eye to Mars.

Today, no one doubts that a person can live in weightlessness for a long time and return from there quite healthy.

In 2015, scientists plan to enrich their knowledge about weightlessness and the effect of microgravity on the human body, moreover, a whole series of annual flights is planned in order to develop as accurately as possible a methodology for future trips to the Moon, asteroids and Mars.

Interview: Oleg Ostapenko, Gennady Padalka, Mikhail Kornienko, Igor Ushakov, Scott Kelly.