Jubilee Post News & Views
Special Desk
Some movies make history and the same is with a Russian film crew that returned back on earth after shooting the first ever movie called The Challenge in space. Actor and director Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko, landed safely in Kazakhstan after spending 12-days on the international space station (ISS).
The movie has been in its own kind of space race – with Tom Cruise. He is apparently part of a Hollywood filming-in-space project involving Nasa and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The film-makers had blasted off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan earlier this month, travelling to the ISS with veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov to film scenes for movie.
The film’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, was said by Roscosmos to centre on a female surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.
Anton Shkaplerov, a veteran of three space missions who travelled with the actor and director, is said to have a cameo role, along with two other Russian cosmonauts aboard the ISS.
The head of the US space agency revealed last year that Cruise was in talks with Nasa about working on a film shot in outer space.
The module carrying Peresild and Shipenko, along with cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, parachuted down to Earth in the Kazakhstan steppe.
The actor and director will now be taken to Russia’s Star City training base for a 10-day rehab, which is two days less than their actual space stay.
The plot of Challenge has not been detailed, but the section in the ISS appears to be that of a doctor – Peresild’s character – operating on a sick cosmonaut (Novitskiy, in a cameo role) whose medical condition means he cannot be treated on Earth.
The feature film is the brainchild of the head of space agency Roscosmos, who at one point fired the head of crewed missions in a row over the project.
