Soyuz TMA-M review

The Soyuz spacecraft’s cabin is hot and sweaty on re-entry, then, but what about the rest of the time? Well, there’s no 18-way adjustable seats or Apple CarPlay, but there’s more than enough other buttons to keep you occupied on a six-hour journey to space. Our picture here shows astronauts in a Soyuz training capsule in Star City, Moscow, as there’s not really the room – nor spare astronaut capacity – to photograph this during an actual trip to the ISS.

While space is clearly at a premium, the Soyuz capsule is a big step up from the command module which transported Neil Armstrong & Co on the Apollo missions of the Sixties and Seventies, though; 50 per cent more living space – nine cubic metres versus six – while weighing less overall. It hosts three people and can support them for up to 30 days, significantly longer than they’ll spend in the Soyuz if all goes to plan.

Potassuium superoxide chambers aboard the craft take the carbon dioxide and water emitted by its passengers, turning them back into oxygen while syphoning off the leftover CO2. It's a techier version of pressing the 'air recirculate' button on your air con when you're stuck behind an old van pumping out black smoke.

This TMA-M, introduced in 2011, replaced lots of analogue equipment with digital to save around 70kg on the Soyuz models that went before it, as well as bringing more passenger space, thus allowing astronauts and cosmonauts over six foot to go to the ISS, with a wider range of shapes and sizes now accommodated – anyone between 4ft 11in and 6ft 3in in height, and 50kg and 95kg in weight.