The first people to ever film a movie in space have returned to Earth after 12 days in orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The Soyuz MS-18 space capsule safely landed in Kazakhstan with Oleg Novitskiy, Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko onboard.
Veteran Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, actor Yulia Peresild and film producer Klim Shipenko travelled to the ISS to film segments of the movie 'Challenge', a Russian production that will be completed and released at some point in the future.
Challenge will tell the story of a surgeon who is required to carry out surgery on a cosmonaut whose medical condition prevents them from returning to Earth.
On initially reaching the ISS Peresild said:
"Everything was new to us today, every 30 seconds brought something entirely new. It is almost impossible to think that this all came to reality. I also feel like I'm still dreaming."
While Shkaplerov added:
"We had a small delay. Thank you to you who taught us how to make decisions. Everything went just fine, and now we're looking forward to our work on orbit. (Peresild and Shipenko) helped. They knew what to do, they were aware of the situation. Everything was done exactly the way it was required by their training."
While many recordings have previously been made in space, including documentaries, no commercial movie has ever been filmed by actors and film crew while in space.
The Russians were not the only ones to have ambitions to film a commercial movie in space. In 2020 it was revealed that US Hollywood star Tom Cruise was working with both NASA and Tesla's SpaceX to organise a movie in space. They will now have to accept second-spot in the history books.
The news of the 'Challenge' movie comes in the same year as the first-ever flight by an all-civilian crew took place onboard Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Bleu Origin rocket, and a flight into orbit by SpaceX, taking human-beings the furthest distance from Earth since the 1972 moon landings.
Earlier this week, William Shatner, who famously played Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series, became the oldest man to ever enter space, aged 90.
[Based on reporting by: Reuters]
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