Challenge Crew Fly Off To Space To Shoot For The Movie: Read To Know More

Actor Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko launched off for the International Space Station in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft together with cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, a veteran of three space missions. Their Soyuz MS-19 lifted off as planned at 1:55 p.m. (0855 GMT) on Tuesday, October 5, from the Russian space launch faculty in Baikonur, Kazakhstan and successfully entered the designated orbit.

Space officials noted that the crew was feeling good and all spacecraft systems were working normally.

Peresild and Klimenko are to shoot portions of a new film titled Challenge, in which a surgeon, portrayed by Peresild, hurries to the space station to protect a crew member who suffers a heart condition. After 12 days on the space outpost, they are set to come back to Earth with another Russian cosmonaut.

Talking at a pre-flight news meeting Monday, 37-year-old Peresild admitted that it was challenging for her to accommodate the strict training and rough demands during the training.

“It was psychologically, physically and morally hard,” she said. “But I think that once we achieve the goal, all that will seem not so difficult and we will remember it with a smile.”

Shipenko who has made many commercially successful films, also depicted their fast-track, four-month practice for the flight as tough.

“Of course, we couldn’t make many things at the first try, and sometimes even at a third attempt, but it’s normal,” he said.

Shipenko, who will finish the shooting on Earth after filming space episodes, said that Shkaplerov and two other Russian cosmonauts on board the station will all play parts in the new film.

Russia’s state-controlled Channel One television, which is comprised in making the film, has greatly covered the crew training and the launch.

“I’m in shock. I still can’t imagine that my mom is out there,” Peresild’s daughter, Anna, told in televised comments minutes after the launch.

Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian state space association Roscosmos, was a key force behind the operation, defining it as a chance to polish the nation’s space glory and opposing criticism from some Russian media.

Some commentators insisted that the movie project would divert the Russian crew and could be awkward to shoot on the Russian portion of the International Space Station, which is extensively less spacious related to the U.S. segment. A new Russian lab module, the Nauka, was added in July, but it is still to be fully combined into the station.

Once they reach the space station just over three hours after the launch, the three visitors will unite with Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov and Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Novitskiy, who is set to feature as the reluctant cosmonaut in the movie, will take the captain’s post in a Soyuz capsule to take the crew back to Earth on October 17.