A film crew is heading off (on 5 October, 8.55am GMT) to spend a week and a half on the international space station.
Scenes for the Russian movie Challenge will be shot at the space station that orbits about 400km above Earth.
Russian actress Yulia Peresild in Moscow, (pictured on 4 June, 2021) is set to take off with director Klim Shipenko to film a movie at the International Space Station. Photo: AFP / Dimitar Dilkoff
Space archaeologist Alice Gorman, from Flinders University, told Kathryn Ryan this is the first fully professional film to be made in micro gravity.
"We have director Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild going up to the station, just the two of them, because space is very limited.
"She'll be doing the main acting obviously but she'll also have to help out, and Klim Shipenko, the director, is going to have to do all of the camera work and all of that practical stuff as well.
"It will be a challenge for both of them I suppose."
Gorman say she's curious to see how the fellow cosmonauts - who will act as extras in the film - would react.
"When I learnt about this, the first thing that came into my head was that there have been very few Russian women in space, which is curious because Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman ever in space back in 1963.
"But since then, basically women have kind of not got much opportunity in the Russian space programme.
"Yulia Peresild is going to be the fifth Russian woman ever to get up there."
They are expected to spend 12 days in orbit, according to media reports, and will be accompanied by a cosmonaut for the journey.
The film is also gaining attention because of its plot, in which Peresild, who plays a surgeon, has to perform heart surgery on a sick cosmonaut in space.
"The health of crew is a big issue and there have been instances in remote Antarctic bases for example where there have been health crisis," Gorman says.
"I think there was one case where a woman had to perform an operation on herself.
"So fortunately, there has never been a case in space, where a crisis like that has happened.
"But in a sense, it's only a matter of time and people are concerned, particularly on voyages to Mars, which are going to be very long, that inevitably somewhere along the way, something like that would happen."
While the surgery isn't real, the film could give ideas to surgeons about the possibilities, she says.
"Limited" experiments in space on rats have shown that blood rises during an operation due to microgravity and ends up obscuring the view of surgeons, she says.
"Scaling up from rats to humans, that's a pretty big leap. There have also been a couple of surgical experiments that have been done on zero gravity flights. These have tended to be keyhole surgery, but open-heart surgery that's a totally different problem."
Gorman believes filming in space as opposed to a studio will add an extra layer of authenticity.
"I think it's going to be about really using the advantages of being in microgravity to film something a bit different.
"The other big thing here is money - they're looking to find private sources of money to keep the International Space Station going.
"I don't think Hollywood blockbuster films or Russian blockbuster films will cut it, but it's a demonstration that private use of the station is possible."
