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The first dog in space. First man and woman. Now Russia has clinched another space flight before the United States: orbiting Hollywood.

Russian actress Yulia Peresild, director Klim Shipenko, and senior Russian astronaut guides Anton Shkaplerov launched a Russian rocket toward the International Space Station on Tuesday. Their job is to shoot the scenes of the first feature film in space. While cinematic scenes in space have long been shown on big screens using sound stages and advanced computer graphics, never before has a feature film shot and directed in space.

May their film in orbit be remembered as a cinematic triumph, the mission highlights the hard work of governments and private entrepreneurs to expand access to space. Earth’s orbit and beyond was once visited only by astronauts handpicked by government space agencies. But in the near future, an increasing number of visitors will look more like Ms. Sherepild and Mr. Shipenko and less like highly educated Mr. Shkaplerov and other space explorers.

A Soyuz rocket, the horsepower of Russia’s space program, took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 04:55 ET.

Prior to Tuesday’s launch, the MS-19 team took pictures and waved to their families and fans in Baikonur. The director of the movie “The Challenge”, Mr. Shipenko, showed a script while waving to the cameras.

“We didn’t forget to take it with us,” he said before boarding a bus with other crew members to put on their flight suits, according to a translator.

The crew then raced to catch up with the space station in a journey that took just three hours. Known as the “two-orbit scheme,” this method was unusually fast because trips to the lab in space typically took between eight and 22 hours in multiple orbits around Earth. (The first three-hour trip was made by a Soyuz spacecraft carrying two Russian astronauts and a US astronaut for the MS-17 mission to Russia in 2020.)

The MS-19 spacecraft, carrying a crew of three, was expected to dock with the space station at 8:12 a.m. As a result of the weather conditions on Earth, the mission’s commander, Mr. Shkaplerov, had to abort the first automatic docking attempt. Mr. Shkaplerov instead manually steered the spacecraft to a port on the Russian segment of the station.

The mission control official in Moscow instructed Mr. Shkaplerov to “up, down, left, right” as he approached the spacecraft to the Russian segment of the station. “Do what you were trained for. You will be fine.”

The capsule locked onto the space station around 8:22 am, slightly behind schedule. The opening of the hatch door was also delayed while the crew checked for air leaks and the stationed Russian astronauts fired their first shots: the arrival of Miss Peresild.

“They’re going to open the hatch from the sides and then glide towards the camera, right? Oleg Novitsky, one of the two Russian astronauts who has been on the station since April, asked for mission control in Moscow.

Another resident of the Russian segment, Pyotr Dubrov, was behind a large digital cinema camera, recording and waiting for the MS-19 crew to open the hatch door and board the station. When it finally opened at 11 am, more than two hours after docking, Mr. Shkaplerov and a smiling Ms. Peresild appeared, followed by her manager, Mr. Shipenko. The trio then attended a welcoming ceremony with the space station’s current crew of seven astronauts from NASA, Russia, Europe and Japan, with Ms.

“I still feel like it was just a dream and I sleep,” she said. “It’s almost impossible to believe that all this has happened.”

The two film crew members will film about two weeks on the space station before returning on October 17 aboard the MS-18 Soyuz spacecraft. Mr. Novitsky will go with the crew, and Mr. Shkaplerov will stay at the station.

“Undoubtedly, this mission is private, we have people going into space who are neither tourists nor professional cosmonauts,” said Dmitri Rogozin, managing director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. He said he hopes the flight will help the agency attract a new generation of talent.

As an actress, Miss Peresild played some 70 roles on the screen, and Russian film publications ranked her among the top 10 actresses under 35. Among Russian moviegoers, he may be best known for his role in “Battle for Sevastopol” (2015). Lyudmila PavlichenkoThe deadliest Red Army female sniper during WWII.

But standing out alone wouldn’t have been enough to get her into orbit: She was selected from nearly 3,000 competitors for the flight through a two-stage selection procedure that included both creativity tests and rigorous medical and physical fitness screening.

Ms. Peresild will also be the fifth Russian woman to travel into space and the first woman on the space station since Elena Serova returned to Earth in 2015.

On the space station, Miss Peresild will star in “The Challenge.” It’s about a surgeon (to be performed by Mr. Novitsky) played by Miss Peresild, who embarks on an emergency mission to the orbiting laboratory to save the life of a sick cosmonaut. A few other details about the plot or the footage at the station have been revealed.

NASA spokesman Rob Navias said on Tuesday that the crew began shooting scenes for the movie as the spacecraft approached the outpost, using hand-held cameras in both the capsule and the space station.

The cinematic storytelling for “The Challenge” can override the symbolism of filming in space. The production is a collaborative project involving Russia’s space agency Roscosmos; Channel One; and Yellow, Black and White, a Russian film studio.

Like so many special missions to space these days, Channel One and Roscosmos hope the movie will prove to the public that space isn’t just reserved for government astronauts. He said on the Channel One website that one of the main goals of the production is to show that “spaceflight is gradually becoming available not only to professionals, but also to a wider range of interested people.”

Rogozin, leader of the Russian space agency, said he hoped the mission would make “a really serious work of art and a whole new breakthrough in the promotion of space technologies” to attract young talent to Russia’s space program.

Funding for Russia’s space program is starting to dwindle. Beginning in 2011, when the US space shuttle program ended, NASA was able to send astronauts to the International Space Station by paying for expensive trips on one of Russia’s Soyuz rockets. However, that ended in 2020 when SpaceX’s Crew Dragon proved that it could send astronauts from American soil. And recently the United States finished purchases The launch of a Russian rocket engine long used for NASA and the Pentagon has generated billions of dollars in revenue for Moscow.

Is this really the first movie ever made on a space station?

“The Challenge” is the first feature film to use scenes shot in orbit. Channel One says the movie will feature around 35 to 40 minutes of scenes being made at the station.

“Other types of productions have been made in space in the past.the pinnacle of fear” is an eight-minute science fiction film shot in 2008 by Richard Garriott, a dedicated astronaut. Garriott, a video game entrepreneur, paid $30 million for his seat in a Soyuz spacecraft that he had booked through Space Adventures. tourism broker. The company is booking future missions to the space station aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

Several feature documentaries are largely based on video shot at the station. “Space Station 3D”, a short documentary from 2002 It was one of the earliest IMAX productions to be shot in space, about the construction of the space station.

Are there any other plans for filming in orbit?

Tom Cruise there may be plans to shoot something on the space stationbut it is not clear exactly when. Deadline, a Hollywood news broadcastreports that in 2020, Mr. Cruise will fly into space with one of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsules for an action-adventure movie directed by Doug Liman. Jim Bridenstine, who served as NASA administrator under President Donald Trump, He confirmed the plans on Twitter and praised them as a chance to mobilize the public around space exploration.

Russia’s space agency announced its intention to send a player to the space station shortly after Mr Cruise’s plans were revealed.

What problems have the Russians had with the space station lately?

Astronauts have been living on the space station, a football field-sized science lab, for more than 20 years, and it’s starting to show signs of deterioration, especially on the Russian side.

Several air leaks have been detected in the Russian part of the outpost in recent years, but none of them posed an immediate danger to the station’s crew. Astronauts found a leak in Russia’s Zvezda service module last year using tea leaves and sealed the leak with space-grade glue and tape. Another gradual air leak is underway and its source has eluded Russian space officials.

And in July, Russia’s new science module Nauka performed a chaotic docking procedure: Shortly after locking onto the station, the module’s thrusters began to fire incorrectly, turning the entire space station one and a half rounds. None of the seven astronauts on board were harmed, but A rare “spacecraft emergency” that confuses NASA and Russian officials to return the station to its normal direction.

Who else will go to the space station soon?

Traffic on the space station will be heavy for the next few months.

On October 30, NASA is scheduled to send a crew of three US astronauts and a European Space Agency astronaut to the space station for a stay of approximately six months. The mission, named Crew-3, will be NASA’s fourth walk to the station using SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, a spacecraft developed with a mix of NASA and private funding.

Then, more special missions. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be launched into the orbital lab on a Soyuz rocket on December 8 for a 12-day stay. Maezawa, the businessman and art collector behind Japanese fashion retail site Zozotown, booked the first space mission with SpaceX in 2018, aiming to one day drive the company’s Starship rocket around the moon. It won’t arrive until 2023, and for Mr. Maezawa’s earlier Soyuz flight, he will bring a producer and a camera to document his trip.

Then on February 21, three private astronauts, each paying $55 million, will fly to the space station in a Crew Dragon capsule reserved by the Axiom Space company. They will be joined by a fourth crew member, a retired NASA astronaut who will essentially serve as guides.

Valerie Hopkins and Oleg Matsnev contributed to the news from Moscow.