Russian actress Yulia Peresild and film director Klim Shipenko yesterday returned to Earth after spending 12 days on the International Space Station (ISS) shooting scenes for the first movie in orbit.
Peresild and Shipenko landed as scheduled on the Kazakh Steppe steppe at 4:36am GMT, footage broadcast live by the Russian space agency showed.
They were ferried back to terra firma by Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who had been on the space station for the past six months.
Photo: Roscosmos / Handout via Reuters
“The descent vehicle of the crewed spacecraft Soyuz MS-18 is standing upright and is secure. The crew are feeling good!” Russian space agency Roscosmos wrote on Twitter.
The filmmakers had blasted off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan earlier this month, traveling to the ISS with veteran Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov to film scenes for The Challenge.
If the project stays on track, the Russian crew would beat a Hollywood project announced last year by Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise together with NASA and Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
The movie’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, centers around a surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.
Shkaplerov, 49, along with the two Russian cosmonauts who were already aboard the ISS are said to have cameo roles in the film.
The mission was not without small hitches.
As the film crew docked at the ISS earlier this month, Shkaplerov had to switch to manual control, and when Russian flight controllers on Friday conducted a test on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft the ship’s thruster fired unexpectedly and destabilized the ISS for 30 minutes, a NASA spokesman told Russian news agency TASS.
However, the spokesman confirmed that their departure was to go ahead as scheduled.
Their landing, which was documented by a film crew, is also to feature in the movie, said Konstantin Ernst, chief executive officer of the Channel One Russia TV network and a coproducer of The Challenge.
The mission adds to a long list of firsts for Russia’s space industry.
The Soviets launched the first satellite Sputnik, and sent into orbit the first animal, a dog named Laika, the first man, Yuri Gagarin and the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova.
Yet compared with the Soviet era, modern Russia has struggled to innovate and its space industry is fighting to secure state funding with the Kremlin prioritizing military spending. Russia is also falling behind in the global space race, facing tough competition from the US and China.
In a bid to spruce up its image and diversify its revenue, Russia’s space program revealed this year that it would be reviving its tourism plan to ferry fee-paying adventurers to the ISS.
After a decade-long pause, Russia is to send two Japanese tourists — including billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — to the ISS in December, capping a year that has been a milestone for amateur space travel.
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