Just a year after announcing plans to film an action movie in outer space, it looks like Tom Cruise is now in a race to space with an appropriate opponent: Russia.
On Thursday (May 13), Russia’s Roscosmos space agency announced that actress Yulia Peresild and filmmaker Klim Shipenko have been selected to film a movie in space later this year, as the pair are scheduled to hit orbit on October 5.
The movie, which has the working title “Challenge,” tells “the story of a female surgeon’s mission to perform an operation on a cosmonaut too ill to return to Earth immediately.”
According to BBC, Peresild and Shipenko have undergone both a medical and a creative selection process. Their special space flight training is to begin no later than June 1 and will include centrifuge and vibration tests, flights on a zero-gravity plane, and parachute training.
The news arrives six months after Russia’s Channel One, in conjunction with Russia’s space agency Roscosmos and production company Yellow, Black and White announced plans to “shoot the first-ever movie in space.”
Meanwhile, in May 2020, Cruise and Elon Musk’s Space X also announced that they’d begun working on a project with NASA that would be the first narrative feature film in outer space.
