Tom Cruise and Hollywood intend to fly into space with the help of NASA

An exclusive on the cover of the American publication Deadline dedicated to the world of show business and published on May 4th brought news that has caused a great stir in Hollywood, the Mecca of cinema, and the whole world.

The famous actor Tom Cruise, the main character in the Mission Impossible movie saga, aspires at 57 years of age to fly into space and be the first to shoot scenes on board the International Space Station -ISS-, which flies over our heads at an altitude of about 400 kilometers.

The news could be a lure to draw attention to the release scheduled for later this year of Top Gun Maverick, the second installment of his first big screen hit from 1986 (Top Gun), but it is not. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Administrator Jim Bridenstine immediately stated through his personal Twitter account that "NASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a movie aboard @Space_Station!"
 

He went on to say that "we need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make NASA's ambitious plans a reality. Shortly thereafter, spokespersons for the organisation confirmed that the Agency was ready to support the efforts of the famous Hollywood star.

The news came as no surprise to Hollywood actors and actresses, who know full well that Tom Cruise is reluctant to use stuntmen in action scenes that involve some kind of danger, especially those that take place at high altitude, such as parachute jumps, shots in planes or helicopters, climbing...

It is no news that every so often true or false news emerges about the interest of some eccentric multimillionaire or show business character in travelling into space. It happened years ago when the famous director of the blockbuster Titanic, Britain's James Cameron, showed his fascination with travelling and filming in the outer space complex.
 

The desire to live a few weeks in space has also been expressed publicly by British soprano Sarah Brightman and American singer Lance Bass, from the pop band NSYNC. Both of them even underwent the basic stages of training in Russia, but for various reasons they did not see their dreams come true and had to make do with the training they received.

The difficulty of shooting commercial film sequences on board the ISS is not only in getting the protagonist to reach the ISS, a 420-tonne puzzle hanging in space at an altitude of nearly 400 kilometres. It would require the refurbishment of the limited interior of the orbital complex, a set of cylindrical modules joined together to form a puzzle the size of a football field, with a living volume of 388 cubic metres, the equivalent of the interior of a Boeing 747 Jumbo jet.
 

But, above all, it requires the United States to have a space capsule in service capable of transporting astronauts to the space complex, which is not the case. Since the last flight of the American space shuttle Atlantis into space in July 2011, Washington has not had its own vehicle to access the ISS. As a result, for the past nine years, NASA has depended on the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) for travel to and from the space complex, which represents a high cost.

The fee charged by Moscow includes the training of American astronauts in Russia and their travel from Earth to the ISS and back, all of which has so far cost NASA between 38 and 80 million per astronaut, as prices varied depending on the year of hire. In total, the United States has paid Russia from mid-2011 to this year an amount in the order of $3.5 billion for the space tickets of some 50 of its astronauts.
 

Fortunately, such an embarrassing situation is about to end. The news about Tom Cruise's wish comes just weeks before the launch from the Kennedy Space Center in the state of Florida of the Dragon demonstration mission, the first manned space capsule developed by SpaceX, a company whose main shareholder is the billionaire Elon Musk, who also owns the innovative electric car firm Tesla.

If Tom Cruise can make it to the ISS, he would become a space tourist - a non-professional astronaut. A human being who, on his own whim or because of the benefits of the film, the production company or he himself are willing to pay the approximately 50 million dollars that the costs of training, launching him into space, flying in a space capsule to the space complex, remaining on board for 10 to 30 days and returning to Earth in another space capsule.

The desire of the American actor has its precedent. A journalist from the Japanese television station Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) was already in December 1990 on the much smaller Russian space station Mir. At the age of 47, Toyohiro Akiyama had to train in Russia for about a year in order to spend almost 8 full days on board with two Russian cosmonauts.
 

His stay on the Mir was the result of an agreement between his television station and the Moscow authorities to report on life in space, making him the first Japanese citizen to travel to orbit. The company was forced to pay $12 million for the exclusive. 

The Mir disappeared in March 2001 after a controlled re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, and the ISS is the largest space cooperation project of all time. With its first module placed in orbit in November 1998, its construction and operation has involved the disbursement of more than $150 billion, largely paid for by the United States, with economic and in-kind contributions from Russia, Canada, Japan and Europe, through the European Space Agency, an agency in which Spain participates. 
 

It is an experimentation centre made up of numerous modules of different sizes and functions, most of which were assembled between November 1998 and mid-2011. Many of them are research laboratories, which means that the daily life of the astronauts who live there is dedicated to research and to maintaining the complex in working condition until at least 2024.

This makes it possible for a permanent crew of at least three astronauts, who are relieved regularly after approximately six months, to live immersed in microgravity (absence of gravity) and where the concept of up and down does not exist. One of those who has been stationed at the ISS is the current Spanish Minister of Science, Pedro Duque, in October 2003.