The Russian crew returned to earth on Sunday at 12:35 am in Kazakhstan after spending 12 days on the international space station for the first movie created in orbit. Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild landed in Kazakhstan to shoot scenes for the first movie in orbit. 

ÂThe descent vehicle of the crewed spacecraft Soyuz MS-18 is standing upright and is secure. The crew is feeling good! Russian space agency Roscosmos tweeted.

Earlier this month, the filmmakers took off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan. They were traveling to the ISS with another cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov to film scenes for “The Challenge”. The movie script revolves around a female surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to protect a cosmonaut. The plot has been kept secret and is yet to be released. 

Movie actor Shkaplerov, 49, and the two Russian cosmonauts are expected to have cameo roles in the films. As the film crew docked at the ISS earlier this month, Shkaplerov had to switch to manual control.

And when Russian flight controllers on Friday conducted a test on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft set to ferry the crew back to Earth, the ship’s thruster fired unexpectedly and destabilized the ISS for 30 minutes, a Nasa spokesman told the Russian news agency TASS.

But the spokesman said their departure is set to go ahead as scheduled. Peresild and Shipenko will bid farewell to the ISS crew on Saturday evening, the spokesman said, and begin undocking at 0100 GMT. 

They will be shepherded home by cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who has been on the space station for the past six months and is set to land in Kazakhstan on Sunday at 0436 GMT.

The trio is going to return to the recovery staging city in Karaganda, Kazakhstan before boarding a Gagarin Cosmonaut Training centre aircraft to further reach their training base in star city, Russia. 

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