Around 60 years after Yuri Gagarin’s first flight, Russia wins another space race against the USA. Roskosmos sends the first feature film crew into space
Roskosmos even invited Elon Musk to launch the “Soyuz MS-19” rocket. “Now we have to wait for it”, it says on the Roscosmos portal, “as he answers the already classic Russian question: ‘How do you like that, Elon Musk?”
Russia’s state space company rejoices: On Tuesday, the first professional film crew, “MS-19”, was shot into space. The actress Julia Peresild and the director Klim Schipenko flew to the International Space Station ISS with the cosmonaut Anton Schkaplerow. And with that, a good 60 years after Yuri Gagarin’s first cosmic flight, Russia finally wins another space race against the USA.
Tom Cruise starts later
In May 2020, NASA announced that they wanted to take Tom Cruise on an Elon Musks space shuttle to the ISS to film science fiction there. But the USA hesitated, a date planned for the beginning of 2022 has now been canceled. While Roskosmos boss Dmitri Rogozin personally pushed the Russian film project with the programmatic name “Challenge” through to Vladimir Putin and got involved as a producer of the film. “I corrected several script versions myself,” the RIA Novosti agency quotes him.
In contrast to Musk, Roskosmos does not have a reusable spaceship at the start, so Rogozin sacrificed one of the three Soyuz rockets built for 2021 for “Challenge”. Two of their scheduled crew members, who have been training for their scientific use on the ISS for over a year, have been deleted. To do this, two other cosmonauts, who were supposed to return to Earth with the MS-20 space capsule, have to do six months longer service in space.
Several spacemen criticized the project. Also because of its cost. According to the business portal “bell.io”, the construction and launch of the Soyuz rocket cost almost $ 53 million, and two NASA pilots would have had to pay $ 110 million for a seat in it. The trip of the film crew costs Russia’s taxpayers about three times what the most successful Russian cinema strips have recorded so far.
“This waste of funds could be excused if the film were one of many real projects, if we were approaching the surface of the sun and exploring Mars at the same time,” the cosmonaut Fyodor Yurtschichin argues with the newspaper “Novaya Gazeta”. “But what does the ‘Challenge’ science project bring?” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said, on the other hand, that it would be great to popularize the patriotic achievements in the cosmos.
In the absence of professional actors and actresses, Russian cosmonauts will mime the space-traveling supporting roles on the ISS. Leading actress Peresild also plays herself in a certain way: she and director Schipenko prepared for the flight into space in a crash course of three months. Peresild’s heroine, however, is a heart surgeon who only has one month for space training before she is supposed to rescue a cosmonaut injured by cosmic debris with an operation in weightlessness …
Russian astronauts promise the film people that they would first fall into euphoria in the ISS, given the fantastic view of the globe. But then they were threatened with headaches, insomnia and nausea as a result of the weightlessness. And it remains to be seen how severely the symptoms of this adaptation phase will affect the filming. “How do you know”, the cosmonaut Mikhail Kornijenko asks a reporter, “that they won’t throw up there for ten days?”
