A Russian actress and film director who spent 12 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to shoot the first fiction film in space returned safely to Earth this Sunday morning (17).
The Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft that carried 37-year-old actress Yulia Peresild and 38-year-old director Klim Shipenko with cosmonaut Oleg Novitski landed in Kazakhstan at 4:36 am GMT (1:36 am GMT), according to the images broadcast by the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
As he exited the ship, Shipenko looked tired and smiling, and greeted the cameras and the people present with one hand, before being taken in for a medical check.
Yulia Peresild, the actress who plays the lead role in the film and who was chosen out of 3,000 candidates, was taken off the device to applause, before receiving a bouquet of flowers.
The actress said she was “saddened” to have left ISS.
“It seemed like 12 days would be too long, but when it was over, I didn’t want to leave,” he told Russian television. “It’s a unique experience”.
Cosmonaut Novitski, who was the first to leave the ship, was greeted by the head of Roscosmos, Dmitri Rogozin, to whom he said: “It’s all right!”.
– US-Russia rivalry –
Russian filmmakers departed for the ISS on October 5 from the Russian space base at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, accompanied by cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov.
Rogozin has previously published photos of his crew as they headed for the landing site aboard ten helicopters.
“It’s a colossal job. We’re happy that the crew feels good, it’s comforting. The ship did not fall sideways, which is better for retreat,” said Rogozin.
With the tentative title “The Challenge”, the film managed to surpass a similar project from the United States, led by Hollywood star Tom Cruise.
The Russian film will feature a surgeon aboard the ISS who must save an astronaut.
In addition to Shkaplerov, two other cosmonauts also appear as extras.
This project recalls, to some extent, the space rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, 60 years after the Soviet Yuri Gagarin became the first human to reach space.
Russian agency Roscosmos unveiled this project last year after the announcement of the shooting of a Tom Cruise film, promoted in collaboration with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
The Russian filmmakers’ trip to the ISS was not without incident. Shkaplerov had to manually dock the ship in the space lab.
As Russian controllers were testing on Friday the Soyuz MS-18 capsule that was supposed to bring them back to Earth this weekend, the engines suddenly activated, which changed the position of the ISS, without it representing any danger.
– Space euphoria –
Shipenko began recording before arriving on the ISS. The beginning of her recording took place during the coupling, in which the actress helped Shkaplerov.
Her return to the blue planet was recorded by a camera crew and will also appear in the film, explained to AFP Konstantin Ernst, owner of Russian producer Pervy Kanal, who co-produces the film.
This project thrived at a time of space euphoria by non-scientific sectors, with the multiplication in recent months of leisure trips to space, such as those carried out by American billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.
The Russian space sector, which was the USSR’s crown jewel by sending the first man and woman into space, has been shaken in recent years by corruption scandals and technical failures, and has lost its monopoly on ISS astronaut travel .
Roscosmos hopes that this film will improve its image.
Even though space missions often generate images, from man’s first steps on the moon in 1969 to the social media posts of French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, never before has a fictional film been shot in space.
In addition to this feature film, Roscosmos also plans to take a Japanese billionaire to the ISS and thus participate in the space tourism business.
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