Russia launches the first film crew in the space station on Tuesday

Russia is set to beat NASA to shoot the first feature film in space.

Russian space agency Roscosmos plans to launch a two-person film crew to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Soyuz rocket next week. Actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko are expected to board the spacecraft with cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, taking off from Kazakhstan at 4:55 a.m. ET on Tuesday.

Shkaplerov will perform his fourth space flight while piloting the spacecraft. On the space station, Peresild and Shipenko are expected to spend 10 days filming on the Russian side, with the help of cosmonauts. In the film, titled “Challenge”, Peresild plays a doctor who launches into the ISS to save a cosmonaut, according to the New York Times.

“I’m not afraid,” Peresild said at a recent press conference, according to the Times. Yet, she added, “fear is normal.”

As part of his training, Peresild flew a parabolic plane, which flies up and down to simulate the microgravity of the ISS for about 30 seconds at a time.

“For the first two seconds it’s scary,” Peresild said, according to the Times. “After that, it’s beautiful.”

She’s about to beat Tom Cruise to become the first actor to be filmed in space. NASA announced last year that it was in talks with Cruise about the set of a movie on the ISS, but no timeline has ever been released.

Roscosmos announced their own space film mission a few months later, sending out a casting call for the actresses to star in it. The agency eventually brought in Peresild and revamped its spaceflight program to allow for an October launch.

The story continues

NASA to break spaceflight record by making room for film crew

Peresild and Shipenko are scheduled to return to Earth aboard another Soyuz spacecraft on October 16, landing in Kazakhstan just after midnight ET the next day. Shkaplerov will remain on the station for a six-month shift, while cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy will complete his shift and return home with the film crew.

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and cosmonaut Petr Dubrovnik, who flew to the ISS with Novitskiy, cede their seats back to the actress and director. Instead, the two will return to Earth in March after spending nearly a year in space. By then, Vande Hei’s mission will be the longest space flight ever by an American, breaking the previous record held by astronaut Scott Kelly.

“I don’t think that’s really my record – I think it would be the whole team’s record,” Vande Hei told Insider in August. “It’s just another step forward for humanity. I also don’t expect this to be a record that would last very long, because we’re doing bigger and better things all the time.”

A year in space would be “a drop in the bucket compared to a flight to Mars,” he added.

2021 is the year of amateur astronauts

Peresild and Shipenko join a new cohort of space tourists and amateur astronauts.

In July, billionaire Richard Branson flew to the edge of space, experimenting with microgravity as he lingered there for a few minutes aboard a space plane built by his company, Virgin Galactic. Nine days later, Jeff Bezos grazed the edge of space aboard the New Shepard spacecraft developed by Blue Origin, the company he founded in 2000.

Earlier this month, SpaceX launched its first crew of tourists into orbit. Billionaire Jared Isaacman chartered the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft for a three-day flight. The mission, called Inspiration4, included Isaacman and three other crew members, none of whom are professional astronauts. The team did, however, undergo nearly six months of training in order to operate the spacecraft.

Other amateur space flights are yet to come. In December, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is expected to take a Soyuz spacecraft on his own trip to the ISS.

Then in February, SpaceX plans to launch three paid customers and a former astronaut to the space station for the company Axiom Space.

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