Moscow: Russia on Tuesday will launch a film actress and director of film into space in the best effort of the United States to the first film in orbit.
If successful, the Russian crew will beat the Hollywood project announced earlier this year by “Mission Impossible” Star Tom Cruise along with Spacex NASA and Elon Musk.
Actress Yulia Peresild, 37, and the film director Klim Shipenko, 38, is expected to take off from Nelayonur Cosmodrome at Ex-Soviet Kazakhstan at 0855 GMT.
Led by veteran cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov, they will travel on the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft for a 12-day mission at the International Space Station (ISS) to the film scene for “The Challenge”.
The plot of the film, which was largely resolved by its budget, was revealed by the Russian Space Agency Rosmosmos to center on a female surgeon sent to the ISS to save astronauts.
Dressed in flight suit, Director of Shipenko called the film “Experiment” at a press conference online on Monday.
“Some things will work and some things will not,” he said.
Shipenko and peresildes are expected to return to earth on October 17 in capsules with Cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who has been in ISS for the past six months.
The launch came at a challenging time for the Russian space industry, which struggled to secure state funds with the Kremlin that prioritized military spending.
Compared to the Soviet era – when Moscow launched the first satellite sputnik and sent the first person, Yuri Gagarin, into space – Russia had struggled to innovate.
The space agency still depends on the technology designed by Soviets and faces a number of setbacks, including corruption scandals and failed launches.
Russia is also left behind in the race of global space, facing intense competition from the United States and China, with Beijing showing a growing ambition in this industry.
The Roscosmos also handled a blow after SpaceX last year managed to convey astronauts to the ISS, cost Russia to travel to orbital stations.
But for political analyst Konstantin Kalachev, space film is a PR issue and the way to “distract” Russia from the “problem” faced by the Roscosmos.
“This should inspire Russia, showing how cool we are, but I think Russia has lost interest in the space industry,” Kalachev told AFP.
In an effort to tidy up the image and diversify its income, Russia revealed this year that it would revive the space tourism program for adventurers to pay ferry fees to ISS.
After a pause for a decade, Russia will send two Japanese tourists – including the Yusaku Maezawa billionaire – to the ISS in December, limiting a year that has become a milestone in amateur space.
Last month, SpaceX completed the first all-civil mission to the room carrying four untrained astronauts on the three-day loop around the earth’s orbit.
The journey followed the Mission of Richard Branson, who spent a few minutes without weight in July, and from the Amazon-Founder Jeff Bezos completed a similar mission just a few days later.