Lights, camera, space, action!
According to Russian Space Agency, the Russian actor Yulia Peresild and film director Klim Shipenko have returned from space and landed on Kazakhastan’s steppe early on Sunday. The Russian film crew has succeeded in beating Hollywood in becoming the first to shoot a movie scene in outer space.
The actor and film director stayed on the International Space Station (ISS) and filmed scenes for their new movie called The Challenge. Last year, Hollywood also announced a Mission Impossible project with star Tom Cruise and collaboration with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX to get the actor on board ISS and shoot a movie there but looks like the Russians beat them to it.
The Russian filmmakers were helped in their special shooting mission by veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov. But it seems like it wasn’t a smooth journey for the film crew either as they encountered many glitched during the mission. During the crew docking at the ISS, Shkaplerov had to switch to manual control. Similarly, a test on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft caused the ship’s thruster to fire unexpectedly and destabilized the ISS for 30 minutes, which delayed some of the movie’s tight filming schedule.
Ground teams for NASA and Roscosmos were able to regain control of the space station after it lost its positioning control but it still caused some trouble for the crew on board as this marked the second instance of such an event on the ISS in the past year.
While this all sounds exciting, we’re still curious about the plot of the actual movie which has been kept under wraps for the time being. All we know so far is that the story revolves around a surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut and maybe the story revolves around “the challenges” he faces? Geddit?!
