Russia sends an actress and a film director into space on Tuesday to shoot the first feature film in orbit in history and to mark some symbolic points of advantage over the Americans after years of disappointment. The goal is to get ahead of Tom Cruise’s film project in space, whose programming is not yet known.
Accompanied by an experienced cosmonaut, 37-year-old actress Yuliya Peresild and 38-year-old filmmaker Klim Shipenko , they must travel to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Soyuz rocket from the Russian Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The Russian team will have 12 days to film space scenes for a film initially titled ‘The Challenge’ , a work whose budget is being kept secret and which will feature a doctor on a mission to save a cosmonaut.
The director and actress appeared relaxed during a press conference on Monday.
The first fiction feature film in space will serve as an “experience,” said Shipenko, who will be in charge of the camera, makeup and lighting in the small space of the Russian segment of the ISS. “I don’t have anyone to ask for advice, I don’t have a cameraman to ask how to film with a window light,” he said.
In addition, this trip should allow Moscow to take advantage of the Americans , in a context of growing bilateral tensions.
“Beat NASA”
For the Russian space agency Roscosmos , the film will have to restore the prestige lost by its corruption scandals, its numerous breakdowns and the loss of the lucrative monopoly of manned flights to the ISS, with the irruption of Elon Musk’s Space X company.
For Roscosmos, it’s about “beating NASA and Space X,” and “diverting attention from (their) problems,” political scientist Konstantin Kalachev told AFP.
The Russian agency had revealed its film project last year, following the announcement of a filming project aboard the ISS with American star Tom Cruise.
Although the images have accompanied all missions to space, a fictional feature film has never been filmed in orbit.
The two space travelers, figures of Russian cinema, underwent an accelerated training to learn to withstand the violent acceleration of takeoff and to move in weightlessness.
As a sign of the importance of the project for Moscow, the producers are heavyweights: Dmitri Rogozine, director of Roscosmos and former deputy prime minister, and Konstantin Ernst, head of the television channel Pervyi Kanal.
The latter is responsible for staging some of the great moments of Vladimir Putin’s reign, such as military parades, presidential inaugurations and the ceremonies of the Sochi Winter Games in 2014.
In April, on the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned flight into space, a symbolic victory for the Soviet Union over the United States in the midst of the Cold War, Putin proclaimed that Russia must continue as a great space power.
The country still wants to get involved in space tourism, which has seen an acceleration in recent months with the flights of billionaires Jeff Bezos, an American, and the British Richard Branson.
The space travel of a Japanese billionaire is scheduled for December.
Other Roscosmos ambitions include a Russian-only space station and a Russian-Chinese station, while Moscow decided to reject a Washington lunar project that it deemed too US-centric.
But none of these projects has a budget or a precise timetable.
