MOSCOW, October 4. /TASS/. Cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky will play the role of a character who needs assistance in the plot of the Challenge movie to be filmed in space, while cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov will also take part in the filming, film director Klim Shipenko told a news conference at TASS on Monday.

"Anton [Shkaplerov] will play the role of a cosmonaut who helps the character of Yulia [Peresild] save a friend who needs help - Oleg Novitsky. And Pyotr Dubrov will also assist in the ‘rescue’ operation," he said.

The Soyuz 2.1a carrier rocket is to be launched from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan at 11:55 Moscow time on October 5. The Soyuz MS-19 spaceship will take cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, actress Yulia Peresild and film director Klim Shipenko to the International Space Station. The spaceship will reach orbit some nine minutes after launch and will approach the International Space Station (ISS) in a double-loop pattern. It will take about three hours and 17 minutes for the spaceship to reach the ISS.

Peresild and Shipenko are expected to film the first-ever movie in outer space. The drama under the working title Challenge is a joint project by Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos, TV Channel One, and the Yellow, Black and White studio. The film will tell a story of a doctor, who has nothing to do with space exploration but is forced to fly to outer space to save a cosmonaut’s life.