A Russian film crew have returned safely to Earth after wrapping up scenes for their movie — the first-ever full-length feature film to be shot in space.
NASA announced that Russian actress Yulia Peresild, producer-director Klim Shipenko, and cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy had departed the International Space Station and landed as scheduled on the steppe of Kazakhstan at 12:35 a.m. ET on October 17. As per the tweet below, Novitskiy had been joined by the film crew for 12 days of his six-month space-cation.
Touchdown after 191 days in space for @Novitskiy_ISS and 12 days in space for two Russian filmmakers! More… https://t.co/CrQl3O1BUl pic.twitter.com/kzXlCTr0og
— International Space Station (@Space_Station) October 17, 2021
Peresild and Shipenko were joined by veteran Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov on their outbound trip, taking them from Earth to space. They arrived at the space station on October 5 to shoot scenes for their feature-length film, "Challenge," under the terms of a commercial agreement between Russian space agency Roscosmos and media entities in Moscow.
Now that they're back on terra firma, the space participants will be transported to a recovery staging area in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, before returning by aircraft to their training base in Russia to inevitably continue work on their film, which is said to center around a surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut, per AFP, as reported by The Guardian.
NASA's also working on a movie with Tom Cruise, which will be filmed aboard the International Space Station. Elon Musk's SpaceX is involved with the project, with filmmaker Doug Liman, who previously collaborated with Cruise on Edge of Tomorrow and American Made, attached as the movie's director. However, the crew's scheduled departure hasn't been shared just yet.
Adele Ankers is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.