Following the flight programme, "The Challenge" film crew - film director Klim Shipenko and actress Yulia Peresild - returned to Earth from the International Space Station. The descent vehicle of the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft landed in Kazakhstan on October 17, 2021, at 07:35 Moscow time. The duration of the work of the crew members on the ISS was 12 days, and the spaceship commander, cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, worked onboard the ISS for 191 days!
On the eve of October 16, a team of rescuers and medics was sent to meet our heroes. They were accompanied by the head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin and the general director of Channel One Konstantin Ernst. The doctors stated the condition of the returning crew as satisfactory. Dmitry Rogozin noted that the landing took place on a straight A level. Vyacheslav Rogozhnikov, an adviser to the head of the FMBA, said that Yulia and Klim endured 12 days in weightlessness much better than expected. "We are happy that everything went so successfully! The guys managed to shoot not even 100%, but 120% of the plan, and they feel brilliant. Konstantin Ernst shared live with the audience of Channel One that Julia had told him it was a pity she had to come back so quickly. According to him, the picture from the ISS turned out to be "stunningly cinematic", and "The Challenge" will be released within a year.
Curiously, the name of the film acquired a double meaning after the real space flight by Russian cinematographers, as the Russian word "Vyzov" (the original title of the film) can be translated both as "a call" and "a challenge". It is now not just a doctor's call (Yulia Peresild) to an astronaut on the ISS in need of medical care, but also a challenge to the whole International Cinema Community: the Russians shot the movie not in the studio, without using computer graphics, but in conditions of real weightlessness, experiencing all the difficulties of human adaptation to the conditions of space.
The prime crew commander, cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, who delivered the film expedition to the ISS on October 5, remained at his post, replacing Oleg Novitsky. After undocking the spacecraft with the cinematographers from the space station, he said, not without a certain irony: "We are fine as there is more space now. We will do some cleaning. Nothing has been cleaned for two weeks, there is such a mess on the Russian segment of the ISS!" Klim and Yulia will tell us everything about the filming in orbit on Tuesday. An online press conference is scheduled for October 19. It will be held together with The Roscosmos State
Corporation for Space Activities, Channel One and the Cosmonaut Training Centre, at the sites of TASS and the Yuri Gagarin CPC. In addition to the story about the return of the crew of the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft, information about the development of the Nauka module and three spacewalks will be provided. The event will be attended by pilot-cosmonaut, Hero of Russia Oleg Novitsky (Roscosmos, Russia), film director of the film "Challenge" Klim Shipenko and the leading actress Yulia Peresild. We will learn firsthand about how our colleagues managed to shoot a film in zero gravity, about their personal feelings and emotions…