BEIJING, July 9 (Reuters) - Sealed behind the steel doors of two bunkers in a Beijing suburb, university students are trying to find out how it feels to live in a space station on another planet, recycling everything from plant cuttings to urine.
They are part of a project aimed at creating a self-sustaining ecosystem that provides everything humans need to survive.
Four students from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics entered the Lunar Palace-1 on Sunday with the aim of living self-sufficiently for 200 days.
They say they are happy to act as human guinea-pigs if it means getting closer to their dream of becoming astronauts.
"I'll get so much out of this," Liu Guanghui, a PhD student, who entered the bunker on Sunday, said. "It's truly a different life experience."
President Xi Jinping wants China to become a global power in space exploration, with plans to send the first probe to the dark side of the moon by 2018 and to put astronauts on the moon by 2036. The Lunar Palace 365 experiment may allow them to stay there for extended periods.
But the 200-day group will also be tested to see how they react to living a for period of time without sunlight.
They want to see how moving the team and housing to stay in the dark side of the moon will affect them?
The project's team declined to elaborate.
"We did this experiment with animals... so we want to see how much impact it will have on people," Liu, the professor, said.