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Tom Cruise Loses Space Race: The Challenge Starts Shooting on the ISS Next Month

This was probably to be expected, seeing how three of the world’s richest men have been racing each other to launch space tourism: there was another space-themed race and it was all about who got to shoot the first movie there.
Yulia Peresild, Klim Shipenko and Anton Shkaplerov will take off for the ISS on October 5, to shoot The Challenge there 15 photos
Photo: Twitter / Roscosmos
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Spoiler alert: Tom Cruise lost.

In 2020, word got out that Tom Cruise, director Doug Liman and an unknown actress, with backing from NASA and SpaceX, would head out to the International Space Station (ISS) to shoot a movie there – or, at the very least, scenes for a movie. Clearly, we’re in an age where no green screen will do anymore. At the end of the year, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, announced that it too was working on a similar project.

Roscosmos and Channel One had partnered up to put together a team for a space-set movie, and they wanted an actress as lead. She was identified in May this year as Yulia Peresild, and Klim Shipenko, the country’s highest-grossing director, came on board to helm it. A tentative start date for the mission (it’s ok to still call it that) was set for October 5, 2021, and the name for the project was announced as The Challenge.

Roscosmos confirmed the launch date in a press conference last week, Variety reports. On October 5, on board a Soyuz spaceship, piloted by experienced space pilot Anton Shkaplerov, the team heads to the ISS to film for 12 full days. Peresild plays a doctor from Earth, sent to save a dying astronaut’s life, and the project is meant to highlight space progress and educate audiences on how space exploration is becoming more accessible to outsiders. Channel One will be broadcasting the project, which, at this point, looks more like a mockuseries than a proper film.

But it’s scripted programming shot in actual space, on board the ISS, and it means Russia has won the space race against the U.S. Speaking to the media outlet, Konstantin Ernst, CEO of Channel One, refuses to acknowledge the so-called space race, saying he would have loved it if his project shot on the ISS at the same time as Tom Cruise’s yet-to-be-titled film. “We would have enjoyed shooting the film together much better,” Ernst says.

Peresild and Shipenko have already passed medical reviews and received crash-course training in space exploration. At the same press conference, Peresild joked that menus in space tend to be diversified than restaurant menus, and said she’d learned how to use a spoon in zero-gravity. She also received parachute and flights in zero-gravity training.

Meanwhile, Tom Cruise...


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Editor's note: Photos in the gallery are of Tom Cruise doing stunts on the set of Mission: Impossible 7. Flying to space would be his biggest yet, whenever it happens.

About the author: Elena Gorgan
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Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends.
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