A Soyuz space capsule carrying a cosmonaut and two Russian filmmakers has separated from the International Space Station and is heading for the Earth. The separation took place on schedule at 0115 GMT Sunday with Oleg Novitskiy, Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko aboard for a descent of about 3 1/2 hours.
‘Challenge,’
Actress Peresild and film director Shipenko rocketed to the space station on Oct. 5 for a 12-day stint on the station 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.
The space capsule is to land in the steppes of Kazakhstan.
Seven astronauts remain aboard the space station: Russia’s Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov; Americans Mark Vande Hei, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur; Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency; and Japan’s Aki Hoshide.
The team was ferried back to terra firma by cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who had been on the space station for the past six months.
Russian movie
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 Russian 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, Mr. 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 the Russian news agency TASS.
The team’s landing, which documented by a film crew, will also feature in the movie, Konstantin Ernst, the head of the Kremlin-friendly Channel One TV network and a co-producer of “The Challenge”, told AFP.
