Daily US Times: A Russian film director and actor have returned to Earth after spending 12 days on the International Space Station (ISS) shooting scenes for the first movie in orbit.
Klim Shipenko and Yulia Peresild landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe early on Sunday. Russian space agency live telecasted the landing.
Both of them were ferried back to terra firma by cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who had been on the space station for the past six months.
Russian space agency Roscosmos tweeted: “The descent vehicle of the crewed spacecraft Soyuz MS-18 is standing upright and is secure. The crew are feeling good!”
Earlier this month, the film-makers had blasted off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, travelling to the ISS with veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, 49, to film scenes for The Challenge.
If the film stays on track, the Russian crew will beat a Hollywood project announced last year by Tom Cruise together with Nasa and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The movie’s plot centres around a surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut. The storyline has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget.
Shkaplerov, along with the two Russian cosmonauts who were already aboard the International Space Station (ISS), are said to have cameo roles in the film.
The mission to the ISS was not without small hitches.
As the crew docked at the ISS earlier this month, Shkaplerov had to switch to manual control.
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