A few hours ago the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and after a little more than three hours reached the International Space Station with three new crew members on board. The ultra-fast route was used which halves the journey duration. The docking with the Station’s Rassvet module was about 10 minutes late because the Kurs automatic system had some problems and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov had to manually pilot the Soyuz MS-19.
Generally, the Soyuz spacecraft carry crew members of the International Space Station on their rotation. In this case, the mission is very special because cosmonaut Anton Nikolaevich Shkaplerov traveled together with producer / director Klim Shipenko and actress Yulia Peresild, who arrived at the Station to shoot a film.
Anton Nikolaevich Shkaplerov. Born on February 28, 1972, in Sevastopol, in the then USSR and now in Ukraine, he started flying when he was very young, so much that he completed flight training on the Yak-52 at the Sevastopol Aviation Club in 1989. He graduated from the Kachinsk Air Force Pilot School in 1994 as a pilot-engineer. He served as an instructor pilot in the Russian Air Force piloting various airplane models and as a parachute instructor. In 2003 he was selected as a cosmonaut candidate and started training. He already served on the International Space Station with the Expedition 29/30, with the Expedition 42/43, and with Expedition 54/55 that ended with the return to Earth on December 17, 2017. He’s married to Tatyana Petrovna and together they have two daughters.
The film will be shot in ten days, mainly in the International Space Station’s Russian section. The shooting schedule was planned to avoid interfering with the crew’s tasks. Director Klim Shipenko and actress Yulia Peresild had to go through a selection and training because they had to be physically fit and have to be ready in case of emergency.
In order to be able to shoot the film on the International Space Station, there were changes in the crew rotation. Klim Shipenko and Yulia Peresild will return to Earth on October 17 together with cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky of Expedition 64/65 on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft. American astronaut Mark T. Vande Hei and cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov, who arrived at the Station with Novitsky, will extend their mission on the Station until March or April 2022.
