We’re less than a week away from the launch of a film crew to the International Space Station.
Director Klim Shipenko, actress Yulia Peresild, and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov are scheduled to launch aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft next Tuesday (Oct. 5) for a 10-day stay. Before 5 a.m.(EDT) (0900 GMT), the trio will take off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome.
According to the New York Times, the movie “The Challenge” is about a surgeon sent to the International Space Station to save an astronaut’s life.
Once they get to the station, Shipenko and Peresild will film part of the movie, which is a joint production of the Moscow-based film studio Yellow, Black and White, Russia’s Channel One and Roscosmos, the nation’s federal space agency.
Peresild’s lack of actual spaceflight experience is meant to reflect the tragedies, sufferings, and breathtaking experience of an average person being pushed into space.
Making the actual space station into a film set will undoubtedly result in a more genuine picture of life in orbit than earlier sci-fi films; however, some aspects will still stretch the bounds of scientific truth, Alice Gorman, a space studies expert, stated in IFLScience.
Peresild’s character will have to perform surgery that has only been performed on animals for research purposes in space. It’s unknown what the fictional surgery set will be like — or whether those scenes will be shot on the space station or Earth — but it’ll be interesting to see how fiction collides with the challenges of filming in space.
On Oct. 17, Shipenko and Peresild, as well as cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, who has been staying on the space station since April, will return to Earth in a Soyuz spacecraft. Shkaplerov, however, will remain in orbit over a more extended period.