A Russian actor and a director on Tuesday arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) in a bid to best the United States and film the first movie in orbit.
The Russian crew is set to beat a Hollywood project that was announced last year by Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise together with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Actor Yulia Peresild, 37, and film director Klim Shipenko, 38, took off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as scheduled. But they belatedly docked at the ISS after veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov switched to manual control.
The crew travelled in a Soyuz MS-19 spaceship for a 12-day mission at the ISS to film scenes for The Challenge . The movie’s plot centres around a female surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.
