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Russia is set to win a race against 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) on a Soyuz rocket on Tuesday. 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.
NASA TV will broadcast the launch live in the embedded video below. The live stream will also include the spacecraft docking with the ISS at 8:12 a.m. ET, and then show the movie star, director and cosmonaut floating around the station around 10 a.m.
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.
The Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft takes off to the International Space Station from the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 9, 2021.
NASA / Bill Ingalls / Document via Reuters
“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 couple of seconds it’s scary,” Peresild said, according to the Times. “After that, it’s beautiful.”
Actress Yulia Peresild before her expedition to the International Space Station on September 19, 2021.
Andrey Shelepin / GCTC / Roscosmos / Document via Reuters
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 filming a movie on the ISS, but no timeline has ever been released.
Roscosmos announced their own space film mission a few months later, sending in a cast for the actresses to star in. The agency eventually brought in Peresild and revamped its spaceflight program to allow for an October launch.
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 performs maintenance inside the space station’s Harmony module on June 9, 2021.
Nasa
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
The Inspiration4 crew inside a Crew Dragon model spaceship. From left to right: Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux.
EspaceX
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.
In September, SpaceX launched its first tourist crew 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 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.
This story has been updated. It was originally released on September 30, 2021.
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