Russian Film Crew Successfully Returns to Earth With the Footage
Russia appears to be beating the U.S. to the first movie shot in space.
Russian actor Yulia Peresild and film director Klim Shipenko returned from space and landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe early on Sunday, according to the Russian space agency. Their return was coordinated by astronaut Oleg Novitsky, who had been on the space station for the past six months.
The actor and film director were in the International Space Station (ISS) filming scenes for the movie called The Challenge. If all goes well, the Russian crew will beat a Hollywood project announced last year by Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise that will see NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX collaborate to get the actor on the ISS and get him to shoot a movie there.
On October 12th, Startrek actor William Shatner also flew to the edge of space and back on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.
The Russian filmmakers were aided in their mission by veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov. However, they encountered many glitches during their mission. During the crew docking at the ISS earlier this month, Shkaplerov had to switch to manual control.
In addition, a test on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft caused the ship’s thruster to fire unexpectedly and destabilized the ISS for 30 minutes. Ground teams for NASA and Roscosmos were able to regain control of the station after it lost positioning control, but the event marks the second instance of such an event on the ISS in the past year.
The thruster incident also delayed some of the movie’s filming schedule
But what will the movie be about? For now, the plot and the budget of the film have been kept under tight wraps, but we do know it centers around a surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.
Sound interesting? We think so and we will be eagerly anticipating its release.
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