Kazakhstan: Klim Shipenko and Yulia Peresild landed in Kazakhstan from the International Space Station, where they were greeted by a crew recording touchdown shots.
The ISS shot was full of drama, worthy of a film named Challenge. After a fault in its thrusters, the ISS tilted abruptly on Friday, halting video. It wasn’t expected to be in the script.
With Tom Cruise, the film has been in its own kind of space race. He’s a part of a Hollywood filming-in-space initiative involving Nasa and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to reports. The module containing Peresild and Shipenko, as well as cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, parachuted down to Earth in the Kazakhstan steppe at lunchtime on Sunday.
The Soyuz’s automatic Kurs docking system failed upon arrival on October 5, forcing the commander to turn to manual control. The actor and director will now be sent to Russia’s Star City training camp for a 10-day rehabilitation period, which is two days less than their real space trip.
The plot of Challenge has not been revealed, although it appears that the segment in the ISS is about a doctor (Peresild’s character) operating on a sick cosmonaut (Novitskiy, in a cameo appearance) whose medical condition prevents him from being treated on Earth.
The feature film is the idea of Roscosmos’ director-general, who sacked the head of crewed missions twice in a row over the concept.
