BAIKONUR /Kazakhstan/, October 5. /TASS/. The Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft carrying three people reached the International Space Station using a two-orbit scheme. The spacecraft docked with the Rassvet module, according to the livestream at the Roscosmos website.
The spacecraft’s crew includes Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, as well as actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko, who plan to film the first live action movie in space. The ISS crew will now check the airtightness of the docking and equalize the air pressure between the ISS and the spacecraft. Then the crew will be able to enter the station.
The spacecraft was unable to dock automatically, so the approach and the docking happened in the manual mode via the TORU system.
The Soyuz-2.1a rocket was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 11:55 Moscow time Tuesday. Peresild and Shipenko received training in the Cosmonaut training center starting in May this year.
The actress and the director fly to the ISS to film a space drama called "Challenge" about a medic who has to travel to the ISS to save a cosmonaut’s life. The filming will involve three Russian cosmonauts - Anton Shkaplerov, Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov.
Peresild and Shipenko will spend 12 days in the orbit and will return on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft, together with Novitsky, who stayed aboard the ISS since April. After Novitsky returns to Earth on October 17, Shkaplerov and Dubrov will stay on the space station for 174 days.