RUSSIA, 7 Okt: Russian actress and a film director arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday (October 5), beating Tom Cruise in the race to shoot the first movie in space.
Their Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft docked at about 1500 GMT at the station, which orbits Earth at an altitude of around 220 miles (354 km).
The filming of the movie “The Challenge” puts Russia on course to beat the United States in the latest chapter of the space race.
“I’m still in a dream. I still feel that it’s all just a dream and I’m asleep,” actress Yulia Peresild, who arrived at the space station with her producer/director, Klim Shipenko, told mission control shortly after they emerged from the open hatch of their Soyuz capsule aboard the space station.
The two reached the cosmos ahead of Cruise, whose plans to blast off on a SpaceX rocket for an as-yet-untitled Hollywood film were announced by NASA last year.
Peresild and Shipenko will spend 12 days on the space station, filming segments for “The Challenge” under a commercial agreement between Roscosmos and Moscow-based media entities, NASA said.
In the film, Peresild plays a doctor who is asked to travel to the space station to save a cosmonaut’s life. Cosmonaut crew members are also set to appear.
Shipenko, whose height of 1.9 metres (6 feet 2 inches) makes the flight in a small capsule especially challenging, has already said he is looking forward to a Mars-based sequel.
About 24 hours before Tuesday’s docking, the space station held a change of command ceremony for the current Expedition 65 crew, as Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency handed over the ceremonial ‘key’ to the space station to Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency.
Pesquet is the first French native to hold the post.
-REUTERS
