While some nations may be content to simply set foot on the moon, Chinese students will live in a laboratory simulating a lunar-like environment for up to 200 days as China prepares for its long-term goal of putting humans back on the moon.

China wants to send a probe to the dark side of the moon by next year, and put astronauts on its surface by 2036, Reuters reports.

The four postgraduate students from the Beijing's astronautics research university Beihang have volunteered to entered a 160-square-meter cabin, dubbed the "Yuegong-1", or "Lunar Palace" beginning last Wednesday and will live in the sealed lab to simulate a long-term, self-contained space mission with no input from the outside world. "I'll get so much out of this," Liu Guanghui, a ph.D. student who entered the bunker on Sunday, said. "It's truly a different life experience. "

The station's specifications have been meticulously curated. "We've designed it so the oxygen is exactly enough to satisfy the humans, the animals and the organisms that break down the waste materials, " said Liu Hong, the project's principal architect.

While living in Lunar Palace-1. Students will recycle everything from leftover plant matter to their own waste. The latter task may bring to mind the Matt Damon character Mark Watney in the 2015 film The Martian, in which an astronaut was forced to jury-rig a space station to support him after he was stranded on Mars. In addition to using his own waste to fertilise plants, Watney had to cope with the psychological toll of being isolated from the outside world. The same is true of the Chinese students testing Lunar Palace-1.

The Lunar Palace is the world's third bioregenerative life-support bases, and the first developed in China. It's the only such facility to involve animals and micro-organisms as well as plants and humans.

China is pouring billions into its space program and working to catch up with the United States and Europe, with hopes to have a crewed outpost by 2022. Last month, China's first cargo spacecraft, Tianzhou-1, successfully completed docking with an orbiting space lab.