Russian TV game show's final frontier

The winner will enjoy this breathtaking view

Have you ever dreamed of going into space?

Have you ever dreamed of flying free of the Earth's gravity, of being able to see the planets, stars and galaxies clear and bright against the vast blackness of space?

If you live in Russia you might be lucky enough to have that dream realised.

Russian Public Television (ORT) and the Russian space agency, Rosaviakosmos, have teamed up to offer a TV game show that goes where no game show has gone before: space.

Building up fitness is crucial before a spaceflight

The competition is open to all. But only 16 candidates will be chosen by doctors and TV officials to undergo training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonauts Training Centre at Star City outside Moscow.

"And the best of them will spend a week in the Russian part of the International Space Station," Konstantin Ernst, director-general of ORT, says.

The right stuff

This elite group will undergo the full training programme for cosmonauts, ORT reports, "a gruelling, virtually, non-stop process which will weed out all but the fittest. And all this will happen in front of the cameras".

Instrument training in the command module

Cosmonauts, usually men and women with exceptional physical and psychological fitness, are often chosen from among the best air force pilots and receive specialist instruction in aerospace engineering.

They must be able to deal with the extraordinary conditions and situations that arise during spaceflight.

Ultimate prize: a space odyssey

Rosaviakosmos has promised to make the show a "spectacle".

"It is a great source of joy to us that this unprecedented project is being done in Russia," Rosaviakosmos director-general Yuriy Koptev told reporters.

Soyuz liftoff: only the winner gets to ride

"Only the strongest will fly to the stars," ORT says, adding that the winner will become the third crew member of the Soyuz TM-A, scheduled for launch in October 2003.

And the envy of space enthusiasts across the world.

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.