Cosmonaut Program The main cosmonaut training center is at Zvyozdny Gorodok, or "Starry Town" (sometimes mistranslated as
"Star City"). Located about 60 km (40 mi) northeast of Moscow, it includes classrooms, spacecraft simulators, a centrifuge for simulating high-gravity conditions, and an underwater spacewalk training facility. Military cosmonauts live in apartment complexes with their families at the center. The Russian flight control center is located in the city of Kaliningrad, where many spacecraft engineering and manufacturing facilities are also located. Russian cosmonauts are drawn almost entirely from two distinct groups: military jet pilots and space engineers. The jet pilots are generally selected at a young ageÑtypically from 22 to 26 years oldÑand begin a lengthy apprenticeship that involves university training, physical conditioning, rigorous psychological and ideological screening, and actual spaceflight support. Approximately half of the selectees complete the ten-year program. They are then assigned as mission commanders, the only flight assignment available to this group. In the other cosmonaut group, civilian engineers come exclusively from the spacecraft design bureaus and the flight control center, where they have already undergone extensive spacecraft familiarization and personal screening. The engineers are generally designated as cosmonaut-trainees at about the age of 30 and undergo a five-year program of general preparation before being assigned to a specific mission. Exceptions can be made to these criteria for special purposes. All Soviet cosmonauts were ethnic Slavs until the 1988 flight of Musa Manarov, a Lak (a small Caucasian tribe related to Iranians). A "guest cosmonaut" from Kazakhstan was flown in 1991 to improve political relations. Women took part in flights only as publicity stunts, to upstage announced American missions involving women, and an all-woman Soyuz mission had been planned as a propaganda stunt for 1985 but was canceled. However, by the early 1990s, several women engineers and scientists had also been selected as part of the regular cosmonaut team, and Yelena Kondakova made a 169-day flight in 1994Ð95 aboard the space station Mir. Because the Soyuz spacecraft used in manned missions has a maximum mission duration of only six months, space station missions longer than this required replacement of the crew's Soyuz by a short "swap" flight that could include one or two guests in the crew. Even during main-crew changeout, two new station cosmonauts could be accompanied into space by a guest who would then land a week later with the returning crew. Since 1978 about 20 non-Soviet guest cosmonauts have been used. The first nine came from Soviet-bloc nations, followed by French, Indian, Syrian, Afghan, German, Japanese, British, and Austrian representatives. Beginning in 1994Ð95, guests from the United States and Europe started making longer visits and also taking part in full-duration Mir missions.