A team of six Russian women have embarked on an eight-day experiment to examine how an all-female team would fare under the physical, social and psychological strain of a long-haul spaceflight.

The women – who are all experts in biophysics, psychology and medicine – are going to perform 10 scientific experiments on board a mock spacecraft, to simulate working on a spaceflight to the Moon and back.

Yelena Luchitskaya, Darya Komissarova, Polina Kuznetsova, Anna Kussmaul, Inna Nosikova and Tatyana Shiguyeva – all aged between 22 and 34 – held a press conference about the project and let’s just say the questions posed were *interesting*.


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The team were asked some pretty ridiculous questions (Picture: YouTube/CCTV)

Turns out highly-trained, intelligent and capable professional females aren’t immune to sexism, because ahead of their mission they were asked: ‘How will you deal you deal with being without make-up for eight days?’

And: ‘How will you cope not being around men?’

Ms Komissarova responded: ‘We are very beautiful without make-up.’

But her colleague, Kussmaul, gave it some sass: ‘We are doing work. When you’re doing your work, you don’t think about men and women.’

Supervisor of the experiment, Sergei Ponomaryov, added: ‘Such a crew is taking part for the first time in a simulation experiment. It’s interesting for us to see what is special about the way a female crew communicates.’

The women are all highly-trained experts in biophysics, psychology and medicine (Picture: YouTube/CCTV)

This isn’t the first instance that females in space have been subject to sexism.

Yelena Serova, the first female cosmonaut aboard the International Space Station got pretty fed up of being asked ridiculous questions like if she was worried about how she’d wash her hair.

Sigh.