Lifeboat Foundation

Tom Cruise is going to film in space thanks to Elon Musk.

EXCLUSIVE: I’m hearing that Tom Cruise and Elon Musk’s Space X are working on a project with NASA that would be the first narrative feature film – an action adventure – to be shot in outer space. It’s not a Mission: Impossible film and no studio is in the mix at this stage but look for more news as I get it. But this is real, albeit in the early stages of liftoff.

Mission: Impossible Fallout took a break, literally when he broke his ankle in a leap from one rooftop to the other and he also hung from a helicopter; he hung from the side of a jet plane during takeoff in Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation, and in Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol he scaled the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai skyscraper, and executed stunts 123 floors up. He is meticulous in preparing these stunts he does, which are frightening just to watch.

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The SpaceX Crew Dragon trunk was secured to the spacecraft on Thursday, April 30, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, in preparation for launch of NASAfs SpaceX Demo-2 mission.

NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will fly to the International Space Station aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A is slated for May 27 at 4:32 p.m. EDT.

Demo-2 will serve as an end-to-end test of SpaceX’s crew transportation system, paving the way for NASA to certify the system for regular crewed flights to the orbiting laboratory as a part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission will be the first crewed flight to launch from U.S. soil since the conclusion of the Space Shuttle Program in 2011.

Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX will each design and build spacecraft that could return astronauts to the Moon.

China is getting ready to build a new space station. On 5 May, the Chinese Long March 5B rocket – the same rocket that is planned to lift parts of a new space station into orbit and eventually carry astronauts to space – launched for the first time from Hainan Island.

For this test flight, the rocket carried with it an unnamed crew capsule. No astronauts were aboard this trip, but according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation it will be able to carry six people at a time, twice as many as the Shenzhou spacecraft that has been used for all the country’s other crewed missions.

After it reached orbit, Long March 5B dropped off the crew spacecraft, which will undergo a few tests in space before plunging back to Earth in the next few days. This re-entry will test the spacecraft’s heat shields, parachutes and airbags. The crew capsule is designed to be reusable and to carry astronauts to the new space station, or to the moon and beyond.

Ground control to Major Tom Cruise.

The company’s crewed mission, set for later this month, will help support missions to Mars.

The last time NASA launched astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center, hundreds of thousands of people showed up to watch the final flight of the space shuttle in July 2011. The expectation, by NASA and others, was that similar crowds would show up when commercial crew flights finally began. The large crowds that showed up for launches like the first Falcon Heavy mission in 2018 or even relatively routine cargo launches appeared to confirm that belief, and NASA was planning for big crowds, not just of the public outside the gates of KSC but also official guests and working media inside, for a historic mission.

Then came the pandemic, and all those plans went out the window.

Now NASA is in the unusual, but understandable, position of telling people not to witness in person one of the agency’s biggest missions in the last decade. “We are asking people to watch from home,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Friday in a media teleconference about the upcoming SpaceX Demo-2 commercial crew mission.

Douglas Hurley, along with Bob Behnken, is about to fly to the International Space Station using a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

How much is a contract to deliver supplies to an imaginary space station worth?