Four decades on from Neil Armstrong’s small step on to the Moon, six cosmonauts touched down yesterday after a “mission to Mars” — without ever having left a Moscow warehouse.

The men — four Russians, a Frenchman and a German — smiled and waved as they climbed out of the hatch of the tubular Mars rocket in which they had spent 105 harmonious days together, simulating the isolation of a flight to the Red Planet and making $20,000 (£12,000) each in the process.

Dressed in blue tunics, the crew members were greeted like returning Soviet-era spacemen, with bouquets and applauding wellwishers, as they stood arm-in-arm outside their windowless capsule, which is housed in a hangar alongside Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems.

“Mission successful,” Commander Sergei Ryazansky snapped to his superiors in Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, whose experiment was run jointly with the European Space Agency to find out how people would react to the stress of the first missions to Mars.

In his log of the voyage, Cyrille Fournier, the French member, revealed that the Russian commander had been giving him dance lessons. “He gave me excellent advice for practising my waltz,” Mr Fournier, 40, an Air France pilot, wrote in his journal. “As I will get married exactly a month after we exit the module it may be helpful for me to know a couple of steps.” Other crew members seemed almost wistful as the team, chosen from more than 5,600 volunteers, reached the end of an experiment that began in snowy March and included a transfer to a Mars landing module and a series of simulated emergencies.

Oliver Knickel, 28, an engineer in the German Army, wrote as their vessel approached the home planet: “On this last isolation day all of us have one laughing and one crying eye, rather than feeling a final relief and counting the seconds for the doors finally to open.”

Captain Knickel said that he had lost all sense of time, although the crew had calendars and were in data and voice contact with the ground — with a delay of up to 20 minutes in each exchange to simulate the time that it takes for signals to travel the distance from Earth.

The cosmonauts’ success in bonding contrasted with a disastrous previous experiment with an international crew conducted by the same Moscow institute between 1999 and 2000.

After they were allowed to toast the millennium with vodka, a female Canadian scientist complained that she was forcibly kissed by the Russian commander and that two crew members had had a fist fight. The Russians attributed the incidents to cultural differences and stress and made sure that the next experiment would be same-sex and alcohol-free.

The six crew members ate space rations, breathed only recycled air and used lavatories and other life-support facilities resembling those on a space station. Each had his own tiny cubicle. They grew food such as lettuce, radishes, onions and cabbage to supplement their prepackaged meals. Spare time between experiments, exercise and sleeping was spent reading, watching films and playing music and games.

“We had an outstanding team spirit throughout the entire 105 days,” Mr Fournier said. “Living for that long in a confined environment can only work if the crew is really getting along with each other.”

They celebrated the 48th anniversary of manned space flight with a feast in April at which Commander Ryazansky provided the music with his guitar. At Orthodox Easter the Russians presented each crew member with a spiky chocolate space egg.

Their journals also described how the crew took it in turns to sit in their tiny sauna and joked that they had their own ghost — a mysterious visitor who repeatedly unplugged the electrodes that monitored Mr Fournier’s brain while he slept.

The mission, part of the Mars-500 programme, will be followed by a 520-day experiment beginning next year, to simulate the full length of a return trip to the planet.

The Americans, Russians and Europeans do not envisage a Mars mission for at least two decades. They acknowledge that it can happen only as an international project.

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