Actress Yulia Peresild, left, director Klim Shipenko' right, and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, members of the prime crew of Soyuz MS-19 spaceship pose at the Russian launch facility
Actress Yulia Peresild, left, director Klim Shipenko' right, and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, members of the prime crew of Soyuz MS-19 spaceship pose at the Russian launch facility. (Photo | AP)

THE TIMES OF INDIA (October 18, 2021)

Moscow: A Soyuz space capsule carrying a cosmonaut and two Russian filmmakers making the first film in space has landed after a 3 1/2-hour trip from the ISS.

The capsule, descending under a red-and-white striped parachute after entering Earth’s atmosphere, landed upright in the steppes of Kazakhstan on schedule at 7.35 am (10.05 am IST) on Sunday with Russian ISS crew member Oleg Novitskiy, Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko aboard, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.

Actress Peresild and film director Shipenko rocketed to the space station on October 5 for a 12-day stint to film segments of a movie titled “Challenge,” in which a surgeon played by Peresild rushes to the space station to save a crew member who needs an urgent operation in orbit.

Russian state TV footage showed the reentry capsule descending under its parachute, followed by ground personnel assisting the smiling crew as they emerged from the capsule. After the landing ground crews extracted the three space flyers from the capsule and placed them in seats set up as they adjusted to the pull of gravity.

They were then taken to a medical tent for exam. All appeared healthy and cheerful. Peresild, who is best known for her role in the 2015 film “Battle For Sevastopol”, smiled and held a bouquet of white flowers as journalists clustered around her. But she said she also felt a touch of melancholy. “That’s because it had seemed that 12 days was such a long period of time, but when it was all over, I didn’t want to bid farewell,” the 37-year-old actor said on state TV.

Novitskiy, who spent more than six months aboard the space station, is to star as the ailing cosmonaut in the movie.

Peresild and Shipenko have been sent to Russian Star City, the home of Russia’s space programme on the outskirts of Moscow for their post-flight recovery which will take about a week, Roscosmos said. Last week 90-year-old US actor William Shatner — Captain James Kirk of “Star Trek” fame — became the oldest person in space aboard a rocketship flown by billionaire Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin.
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BOMBAY TIMES (October 18, 2021)

Russian actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko returned to Earth on Sunday, after spending 12 days on the International Space Station (ISS) shooting scenes for the first movie in orbit. They landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe at 0436 GMT, according to footage broadcast live by the Russian space agency. They were ferried back to terra firma by cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who had been on the space station for the past six months.

The filmmakers had blasted off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan earlier this month, travelling to the ISS with veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov to film scenes for The Challenge.

If the project stays on track, the Russian crew will beat a Hollywood project announced last year by Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise together with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The movie’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, centres around a surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.

Shkaplerov, 49, along with the two Russian cosmonauts, who were already aboard the ISS, are said to have cameo roles in the film. The mission was not without small hitches. As the film crew docked at the ISS earlier this month, Shkaplerov had to switch to manual control. And when Russian flight controllers on Friday conducted a test on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft, the ship’s thruster fired unexpectedly and destabilised the ISS for 30 minutes, a NASA spokesman told a Russian news agency. Their landing, which was documented by a film crew, will also feature in the movie.