Russia sends actress and film producer to space to shoot cosmic film

Early this morning, a trio of Russians were launched towards the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, but two of the these aviators were not ordinary cosmonauts. The team included a Russian actress named Yulia Peresild and a film producer named Klim Shipenko, who have just docked at the station to film scenes from an upcoming movie. With their arrival, they are the first multi-person film crew to visit the ISS.

Peresild and Shipenko will stay on the station for just 12 days, filming scenes for a film titled The challenge. The film revolves around a Russian doctor, played by Peresild, who must travel to the space station to treat a sick cosmonaut. Producer Shipenko will work on the set and lighting. The two flew into space with Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, who will live on the station until spring, conducting research for Russian space company Roscosmos. He will also participate in the production. Shkaplerov, along with Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrovnik – who already live on the station – will play minor roles in the production of the film.

This Russian film crew may just be the start of the cast that will be heading to space in the next few years. On October 12, William Shatner is expected to fly to the edge of space and return to Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, although he doesn’t actually make it to orbit. (It has been reported that Tom Cruise may one day fly to the space station on a SpaceX Dragon to shoot scenes from a movie, but nothing has been confirmed.)

Roscosmos TASS press office photo via Getty Images

Today’s mission began at 4:55 a.m. ET, with the Russian Soyuz rocket taking off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The trio took a short trip, make only two turns around the Earth before approaching the International Space Station. However, the meeting with the station did not go exactly as planned. While the Soyuz capsule is able to dock on its own to the ISS, this particular approach was not aligned and Shkaplerov had to take control of the vehicle manually. He successfully docked the capsule on the station.

Peresild and Shipenko will be shooting primarily on the Russian component of the space station while they are up there. Meanwhile, on the US side of the ISS, an international crew of astronauts have been living and working together for many months. They include NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, as well as French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency and Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Once packed, Peresild and Shipenko will return to Earth in another Soyuz in mid-October with Novitskiy.

The ISS is no stranger to space tourist visits and movies have been recorded in space before. In the 1980s, astronauts aboard the first space shuttle flights brought IMAX cameras with them to record footage, which was compiled into a documentary titled The dream is alive. And when video game developer Richard Garriott flew to the space station in 2008 as a paid space tourist, he made a sci-fi short titled Peak of fear. It was the first fictional film shot entirely in space, even though it was less than eight minutes long. The challenge should be the first feature film to include scenes shot in space.