Russian Actress Films Movie in Space

The Soyuz spacecraft met with the International Space Station on October 5, bringing its 3 crew members to the 7 already aboard for Expedition 65. An unusual mission for the Soyuz crew, as they brought with them Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer Klim Shipenko for their first space flights under a collaboration between Roscosmos and Moscow media companies. 

They will be filming segments for their upcoming movie, “The Challenge” a docudrama about a cosmonaut who loses consciousness in space and requires heart surgery in zero gravity. Peresild won the coveted position as the actress-turned-cosmonaut in May when she was cast as the heart surgeon. Her training program was accelerated into four months as she trained at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre alongside backup crews. The curriculum was likely pared down to the essentials, focusing on Soyuz launch, docking, landing, while dealing with emergent situations. Relatively taciturn in comparison to western training programs, the spaceflight participants were barred from formal interviews, with brief social media postings revealing the difficulty for civilian students. 

In August, Peresild said “The word hard does not come close to describing how it is.” Sources within the GCTC had said she struggled with the vast amount of technical information to retain rapidly, and had been outperformed by her backup actress. All went well, however, for her fans following the launch. Peresild has made her place in history, to the chagrin of her understudy’s following online.

The required movie equipment was shipped to the ISS aboard the previous Soyuz MS-17, weighing a scant 31 pounds, if compared to terrestrial filming equipment. Peresild and Shipenko will return to earth with Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy on October 16 on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft. Other crew will remain, to return to earth aboard Soyuz MS-19. Aboard that spacecraft will be NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, completing his mission which will have lasted a 355-day mission, the longest single spaceflight by an astronaut in U.S. History. Other Expedition 65 crewmembers from the ESA, NASA, and JAXA astronauts, set to return in November. 

FMI: www.nasa.gov