Steph Deschamps / October 17, 2021
The Russian actress and director who stayed for 12 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to shoot the first film in space landed on Sunday morning on Earth.
The Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft carrying Yulia Peressild, Klim Chipenko and cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky arrived in the steppes of Kazakhstan at 04:36, the scheduled time, according to images broadcast live by the Russian space agency.
The descent vehicle of the manned spacecraft Soyuz MS-18 stands vertically and is secure. The crew is feeling good! said Roscosmos on Twitter.
Ahead of a competing American project with Tom Cruise, actress Yulia Peressild, 37, and director Klim Chipenko, 38, took off on October 5 from the Russian cosmodrome of Baikonur in Kazakhstan, alongside veteran cosmonaut Anton Chkaplerov.
Their film, tentatively titled The Challenge, will feature a surgeon who travels to the ISS with the mission of saving the life of a cosmonaut.
In a context of Russian-American rivalry, this cinematographic adventure also takes on the appearance of a new race to space exploits, 60 years after the USSR put the first man into orbit, Yuri Gagarin.
This initiative comes in the middle of a non-scientific rush to space, with the multiplication in recent months of leisure flights, such as those of British billionaire Richard Branson and American Jeff Bezos.