AFP UK

The lives of thousands may have been devastated by the volcano’s eruption on La Palma island, but many are starting to dream of returning home and starting to rebuild. 

It has been more than two weeks since La Cumbre Vieja began erupting, forcing more than 6,000 people out of their homes as the lava burnt its way across huge swathes of land on the western side of La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands. 

And there is no legislation that prevents them from going back to their homes in the Aridane valley, a fertile agricultural area that is home to 20,000 people that has borne the brunt of the eruption, with the lava destroying more than 1,000 buildings.

Unlike Italy’s Mount Etna or Mount Fuji in Japan, which have one central vent, the volcano on La Palma makes a new fissure each time it erupts, meaning it isn’t possible to set up a clearly defined exclusion zone. 

“It wouldn’t be much help, because these type of volcanos erupt wherever they want,” said Manuel Perera, an architect and head of urban planning in Los Llanos de Aridane, the worst-hit area on the western side of the island. 

During the last two eruptions on La Palma in 1949 and 1971, there was very little damage, largely because the population density was much lower. 

What is clear is that nobody wants to leave. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” insists Pedro Antonio Sanchez, a 60-year-old resident whose banana plantation was damaged in the eruption but who is determined to stay put. 

“There are whole populated areas like Todoque and others that have disappeared and many residents, who have roots there, want to stay in the area,” Canary Islands’ regional leader Angel Victor Torres told local newspaper El Diario de Avisos on Monday. 

The only regulation regarding the right to rebuild has to do with the cooled lava, which must be respected as “a protected natural space” — meaning no-one can build on it, Perera says.

But the authorities appear to be taking a more flexible approach. 

“A draft bill is being prepared that will classify this land as suitable for development in order to allow the orderly reconstruction of areas that have been destroyed,” Torres said. 

– ‘Life on Mars’ –

The Atlantic archipelago, which is located off the northwestern coast of Africa and counts seven islands, has undergone huge changes as a result of volcanic activity over the past 12,000 years.

“This is just what happens in the Canary Islands and many people from the mainland do not really understand. They are not islands facing a volcanic threat, they are volcanic islands,” wrote journalist Alfonso Gonzalez Jerez in Sunday’s El Dia newspaper. 

“The Canary Islands are not surviving in spite of the volcanoes: it is the volcanoes that have created the Canaries.”

Although it is scientifically impossible to predict when the eruption will end, some experts have spoken of several weeks based on previous experience. 

And it could take the lava six to nine months to cool, Borja Perdomo, regional head of infrastructure, said this week, quoting experts.

Some residents have asked the authorities not to impose any restrictions on the area but experts say it would be impossible to build any houses there in the short term. 

“It would be like being on Mars,” explained Perera.

“It’s the worst place on the whole island for reconstruction because it could be months or even years until it cools down.”

So far the lava has covered more than 1,000 acres (434 hectares) of land, and when it cools, it will have “an irregular surface with steep drops that is very uneven,” he said.

“It’s terrain that is very difficult to work with.”

– New fertile land? –

Despite the ongoing eruption, life is carrying on as normal in most of the island, except for the disruption caused by damaged and destroyed roads. 

The lava has covered less than 8.0 percent of the Aridane valley and this is where the biggest changes will take place, starting with the rehousing of those who have lost their homes. 

The island has also gained another 75 acres of surface area due to the lava pouring off a 500-metre stretch of coastline into the sea, creating a vast delta that will be used at some point in the future. 

On the island of El Hierro, a similar deposit has become a tourist attraction for its natural pools, while in the delta created by the 1949 eruption of La Palma’s San Juan de la Plata volcano was used for banana plantations. 

At that site, which lies just down the coast from the newly-created lava delta, locals went to work levelling the surface using little more than picks and shovels, with the resulting land one of the most fertile areas for growing bananas. 

More than five billion people could have difficulty accessing water in 2050, the United Nations warned Tuesday, urging leaders to seize the initiative at the COP26 summit.

Already in 2018, 3.6 billion people had inadequate access to water for at least one month per year, said a new report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.

“We need to wake up to the looming water crisis,” said WMO chief Petteri Taalas.

“The State of Climate Services 2021: Water” report comes just weeks before COP26 — the UN Climate Change Conference being held in Glasgow from October 31 to November 12.

The WMO stressed that over the last 20 years, the levels of water stored on land — on the surface, in the subsurface, in snow and ice — had dropped at a rate of one centimetre per year.

The biggest losses are in Antarctica and Greenland, but many highly-populated lower latitude locations are experiencing significant water losses in areas that traditionally provide water supply, said the WMO.

The agency said there were major ramifications for water security, as only 0.5 percent of water on Earth is useable and available fresh water.

“Increasing temperatures are resulting in global and regional precipitation changes, leading to shifts in rainfall patterns and agricultural seasons, with a major impact on food security and human health and well-being,” said Taalas.

– ‘We cannot wait’ –

Meanwhile water-related hazards have increased in frequency over the past 20 years.

Since 2000, flood-related disasters have risen by 134 percent compared with the previous two decades. 

“We have seven percent more humidity in the atmosphere because of the current warming and that’s also contributing to the flooding,” Taalas told a press conference.

Most of the flood-related deaths and economic losses were recorded in Asia, where river flood warning systems require strengthening, said the WMO.

At the same time, there has been around a 30 percent increase in the amount and duration of drought events since 2000, with Africa the worst-affected continent.

Taalas urged countries at COP26 to raise their game.

He said most world leaders were talking about climate change as a major risk to the welfare of mankind, but their actions were not matching their words.

“We cannot wait for decades to start acting,” he said.

“That’s also a message for countries like China which has said that they would like to become carbon neutral by 2060 but they don’t have a concrete plan for the coming decade.”

He said the top priority at COP26 was stepping up ambition levels in climate mitigation, but more work was also needed on climate adaptations, as the negative trend in weather patterns will continue for the coming decades — and the coming centuries when it comes to the melting of glaciers and sea levels rising.

US-Japanese scientist Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann of Germany and Giorgio Parisi of Italy on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for climate models and the understanding of physical systems, the jury said.

The Nobel committee said it was sending a message with its prize announcement just weeks before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, as the rate of global warming sets off alarm bells around the world.

“The world leaders that haven’t got the message yet, I’m not sure they will get it because we are saying it. But … what we are saying is that the modelling of climate is solidly based in physics theory,” said chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, Thor Hans Hansson.

Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, share one half of the 10-million-kronor ($1.1-million, one-million-euro) prize for their research on climate models, while Parisi, 73, won the other half for his work on the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems.

“Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it,” the Nobel Committee said.

“Giorgio Parisi is rewarded for his revolutionary contributions to the theory of disordered materials and random processes,” it added.

“The discoveries being recognised this year demonstrate that our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on a rigorous analysis of observations,” Hansson said.

Manabe is affiliated with Princeton University in the US, while Hasselmann is a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.

Parisi, who also won the prestigious Wolf Prize in February, is a professor at Sapienza University of Rome.

– ‘We have to act now’ –

Working in the 1960s, Manabe showed how levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere correspond to increased Earth surface temperatures. 

He was influential in developing the physical models of Earth’s climate and worked on how exactly the heat energy received by Earth from the Sun radiates back into the atmosphere.

Hasselmann was credited for working out how climate models can remain reliable despite sometimes chaotic variation in weather trends. 

The Committee praised his identification of climate “fingerprints” caused by both natural and human activities and how much climate change can be contributed solely to man-made emissions.

Already three decades ago, Hasselmann issued an eerily accurate warning about where the climate was headed. 

“In 30 to 100 years, depending on how much fossil fuel we consume, we will face a very significant climate change,” Hasselmann said in a 1988 interview, according to a statement from the Max Planck Society in Germany.

“We should realise that we are entering a situation where there is no turning back,” he said at the time.

Parisi was honoured for his work in the 1980s that was said by the Committee to be “among the most important contributions” to the theory of complex systems. 

His work made it possible for physicists to understand apparently entirely random materials, with wide-ranging applications including mathematics, biology, and machine learning.

Linking Manabe and Hasselman’s work to Parisi’s, the Nobel Foundation said this year’s prize “recognises new methods for describing complex systems and predicting their long-term behaviour.”

“One complex system of vital importance to humankind is Earth’s climate.”

“It’s clear that for future generations, we have to act now in a very fast way,” Parisi told reporters during a live telephone interview when asked if he had a message for the COP26 summit.

– Prize ceremony cancelled –

In Geneva, the head of the World Meteorological Organization, Petteri Taalas, said the prize demonstrates that “climate science is highly valued, and it should be highly valued.”

Tuesday’s award was the first Nobel in physics to honour climate work but the subject has previously gotten the nod in other Nobel disciplines.

Manabe told Japanese broadcaster NHK he was “honoured” and “surprised” to receive the prize, adding: “The world suffers from drought and wildfire. Maybe (the award) has something to do with these.”

The Physics Prize was the second Nobel of the season after the medicine prize on Monday went to a US duo for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch. 

The award for chemistry will be announced on Wednesday, followed by the much-anticipated prizes for literature on Thursday and peace on Friday before the economics prize winds things up on Monday, October 11.

The Nobel Foundation has already announced that the glittering prize ceremony and banquet held in Stockholm in December for the science and literature laureates will not happen this year due to the pandemic.

A decision has yet to be made about the lavish Peace Prize ceremony held in Oslo on the same day.

The United Arab Emirates will launch a spacecraft to explore a major asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, officials said Tuesday, after a UAE probe reached the red planet early this year.

The five-year journey from 2028 will traverse 3.6 billion kilometres (2.2 billion miles), with the unmanned craft drawing on gravity assists from Earth and Venus to reach the main asteroid belt beyond Mars, officials said. 

“The mission will make its first close planetary approach orbiting Venus in mid-2028, followed by a close orbit of Earth in mid-2029,” the UAE Space Agency said in a statement. 

“It will make its first fly-by of a main asteroid belt object in 2030, going on to observe a total of seven main belt asteroids before its final landing on an asteroid 560 million kilometres from Earth in 2033.”

The UAE — made up of seven emirates including the capital Abu Dhabi and Dubai — is a newcomer to the world of space exploration.

In September 2019, the oil-rich country sent the first Emirati into space as part of a three-member crew that blasted off on a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan. 

Then in February 2021 its “Hope” probe successfully entered Mars’ orbit on a journey to reveal the secrets of Martian weather, in the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission.

The UAE also has plans to send an unmanned rover to the moon by 2024. 

Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the UAE’s de facto leader, said that the launch of the new project sets an “ambitious” new goal for the country.

“The UAE is determined to make a meaningful contribution to space exploration, scientific research and our understanding of the solar system,” he tweeted. 

A Russian actress and director on Tuesday arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) in a bid to best the United States and film the first movie in orbit.

The Russian crew is set to beat a Hollywood project that was announced last year by “Mission Impossible” star Tom Cruise together with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Actress Yulia Peresild, 37, and film director Klim Shipenko, 38, took off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan as scheduled. 

But they belatedly docked at the ISS at 1222 GMT after veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov switched to manual control. 

“Welcome to the ISS!” Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said on Twitter. 

The crew travelled in a Soyuz MS-19 spaceship for a 12-day mission at the ISS to film scenes for “The Challenge”.

The movie’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, was revealed by Roscosmos to centre around a female surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.

Shkaplerov and two other Russian cosmonauts aboard the ISS are said to have cameo roles in the film. 

The ISS crew, which also includes a French, a Japanese and three NASA astronauts, will welcome the newcomers when the hatch opens at around 1410 GMT.

– ‘It was difficult’ –

“It was difficult psychologically, physically and emotionally… but I think when we reach our goal all the challenges won’t seem so bad,” Peresild — who was selected out of 3,000 applicants for the role — said at a pre-flight press conference on Monday.

True to a pre-flight tradition religiously observed by cosmonauts, the crew said that on Sunday they watched the classic Soviet film “The White Sun of the Desert”.

Shipenko and Peresild are expected to return to Earth on October 17 in a capsule with cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who has been on the ISS for the past six months.

“Space is where we became pioneers, where despite everything we maintain a fairly confident position,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Tuesday.

If successful, the mission will add to a long list of firsts for Russia’s space industry.

The Soviets launched the first satellite Sputnik, and sent the first animal, a dog named Laika, the first man, Yuri Gagarin, and the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into orbit.

But compared with the Soviet era, modern Russia has struggled to innovate and its space industry is fighting to secure state funding with the Kremlin prioritising military spending. 

Its space agency is still reliant on Soviet-designed technology and has faced a number of setbacks, including corruption scandals and botched launches.

Russia is also falling behind in the global space race, facing tough competition from the United States and China, with Beijing showing growing ambitions in the industry.

– Russians ‘lost interest’ –

Roscosmos was also dealt a blow after SpaceX last year successfully delivered astronauts to the ISS, costing Russia its monopoly for journeys to the orbital station. 

For political analyst Konstantin Kalachev, the space film is a matter of PR and a way to “distract” Russians from the “problems” that Roscosmos is facing.

“This is supposed to inspire Russians, show how cool we are, but I think Russians have completely lost interest in the space industry,” Kalachev told AFP.

In a bid to spruce up its image and diversify its revenue, Russia’s space programme revealed this year that it will be reviving its tourism programme to ferry fee-paying adventurers to the ISS. 

After a decade-long pause, Russia will send two Japanese tourists — including billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — to the ISS in December, capping a year that has been a milestone for amateur space travel.

Last month, SpaceX completed the first all-civilian mission to space that took four untrained astronauts on a three-day loop around the Earth’s orbit. 

The trip followed billionaire Richard Branson’s several minutes in weightlessness in July, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos completing a similar mission days later.

Later this month, 90-year-old actor William Shatner, known for his portrayal of Captain Kirk in the Star Trek series, will fly to space on a mission with Bezos’s Blue Origin.

US-Japanese scientist Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann of Germany and Giorgio Parisi of Italy on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for climate models and the understanding of physical systems, the jury said.

The Nobel committee said it was sending a message with its prize announcement just weeks before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, as the rate of global warming sets off alarm bells around the world.

“The world leaders that haven’t got the message yet, I’m not sure they will get it because we are saying it. But … what we are saying is that the modelling of climate is solidly based in physics theory,” said chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, Thor Hans Hansson.

Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, share one half of the 10-million-kronor ($1.1-million, one-million-euro) prize for their research on climate models, while Parisi, 73, won the other half for his work on the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems.

“Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it,” the Nobel Committee said.

“Giorgio Parisi is rewarded for his revolutionary contributions to the theory of disordered materials and random processes,” it added.

“The discoveries being recognised this year demonstrate that our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on a rigorous analysis of observations,” Hansson said.

Manabe is affiliated with Princeton University in the US, while Hasselmann is a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.

Parisi, who also won the prestigious Wolf Prize in February, is a professor at Sapienza University of Rome.

– ‘We have to act now’ –

Working in the 1960s, Manabe showed how levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere corresponded to increased Earth surface temperatures. 

He was influential in developing the physical models of Earth’s climate and worked on how exactly the heat energy received by Earth from the Sun radiates back into the atmosphere.

Hasselmann was credited for working out how climate models can remain reliable despite sometimes chaotic variation in weather trends. 

The Committee praised his identification of climate “fingerprints” caused by both natural and human activities and how much climate change can be contributed solely to man-made emissions.

Parisi was honoured for his work in the 1980s that was said by the Committee to be “among the most important contributions” to the theory of complex systems. 

His work made it possible for physicists to understand apparently entirely random materials, with wide-ranging applications including mathematics, biology, and machine learning.

Linking Manabe and Hasselman’s work to Parisi’s, the Nobel Foundation said this year’s prize “recognises new methods for describing complex systems and predicting their long-term behaviour.”

“One complex system of vital importance to humankind is Earth’s climate.”

“It’s clear that for future generations, we have to act now in a very fast way,” Parisi told reporters during a live telephone interview when asked if he had a message for the COP26 summit.

– Prize ceremony cancelled –

In Geneva, the head of the World Meteorological Organization, Petteri Taalas, said the prize demonstrates that “climate science is highly valued, and it should be highly valued.”

Tuesday’s Physics Prize was the first Nobel in Physics or Chemistry to honour climate work since the 1995 Chemistry Prize was awarded for research into Earth’s ozone hole.

Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai won the 2004 Peace Prize for her work against deforestation in Africa, and former US vice president Al Gore and the UN’s IPCC won in 2007 for raising awareness of climate change.

In 2018, economist William Nordhaus was honoured “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis”.

The Physics Prize was the second Nobel of the season after the medicine prize on Monday went to a US duo for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch. 

The award for chemistry will be announced on Wednesday, followed by the much-anticipated prizes for literature on Thursday and peace on Friday before the economics prize winds things up on Monday, October 11.

The Nobel Foundation has already announced that the glittering prize ceremony and banquet held in Stockholm in December for the science and literature laureates will not happen this year due to the pandemic.

Like last year, laureates will receive their awards in their home countries.

A decision has yet to be made about the lavish Peace Prize ceremony held in Oslo on the same day.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s pointman for the COP26 climate summit insisted Tuesday that his own Conservative party was on board with the ambition of saving the planet.

COP26 president Alok Sharma said that despite grumbling on the party’s right wing at its annual conference, MPs all saw the potential for a green economic revolution.

“Sometimes people don’t perceive the Conservatives as leading on this,” the former business minister said on the sidelines of the conference in Manchester, northwest England.

“Cabinet colleagues actually understand why it’s vitally important to get this right,” he said, ahead of the two-week COP26 summit in Scotland starting on October 31.

“And we’re seeing the benefits of that coming through in terms of growth, in terms of cutting emissions. 

“This is a real, real opportunity to create jobs, to create growth, to have a healthier country, a healthier planet.” 

In his speech closing the Conservative gathering on Wednesday, Johnson is also expected to talk up Britain’s action on climate change and the need for global coordination.

Touring exhibitors’ stands at the conference on Tuesday, Johnson rode an e-bike, got in a electric tractor, and played with a puzzle to assemble a zero-carbon energy house.

But at the Manchester gathering as a whole, the topic of climate change has been relegated to the back burner this week. 

Sharma was not given one of the headline speaking slots.

And the issue was absent from finance minister Rishi Sunak’s keynote address on Monday, when he laid out a strategy to fix Britain’s finances and focus on tech-led growth after the Covid crisis. 

– ‘Irresponsible crusties’ –

The omission was a “damaging sign” ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, commented Rebecca Newsom, head of policy for Greenpeace UK.

“Coughing up more cash for green infrastructure now would save enormous costs later and create millions of new jobs across the UK,” she said.

“At a time when we need spending commitments for a zero carbon future, Rishi sounds like he’s preparing to take a big step backwards.”

Nor did Foreign Secretary Liz Truss use the C word — climate — in her own speech on Sunday, save for a fleeting promise to support “greener” growth and “clean infrastructure” in developing countries.

In contrast the B word — Brexit — has been a recurrent theme for delegates of Johnson’s party, adamant that current problems associated with the EU divorce will pass.

Brexit minister David Frost admonished the “anti-transport, anti-car” lobby’s “anti-growth ideologies” and “persistent miserabilism”, arguing that human ingenuity and technological innovation will save the day.

Interior minister Priti Patel used her own speech on Tuesday to promise tougher police and court action against climate protestors who have been blockading UK roads and whom Johnson characterised as “irresponsible crusties”.

“I will not tolerate so-called eco-warriors trampling over our way of life and draining police resources,” she said to applause from the Tory faithful.

US-Japanese scientist Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann of Germany and Giorgio Parisi of Italy on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for climate models and the understanding of physical systems, the jury said.

The announcement came a month ahead of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, where global warming will top the world agenda.

Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, share one half of the 10-million-kronor ($1.1-million, one-million-euro) prize for their research on climate models, while Parisi, 73, won the other half for his work on the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems.

“Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it,” the Nobel Committee said in a statement.

“Giorgio Parisi is rewarded for his revolutionary contributions to the theory of disordered materials and random processes,” it added.

“The discoveries being recognised this year demonstrate that our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on a rigorous analysis of observations,” Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement.

Manabe is affiliated with Princeton University in the US, while Hasselmann is a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.

Parisi is a professor at Sapienza University of Rome.

– Climate models –

Working in the 1960s, Manabe showed how levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere corresponded to increased Earth surface temperatures. 

He was influential in developing the physical models of Earth’s climate and worked on how exactly the heat energy received by Earth from the Sun radiates back into the atmosphere.

Hasselmann was credited for working out how climate models can remain reliable despite sometimes chaotic variation in weather trends. 

The Committee praised his identification of climate “fingerprints” caused by both natural and human activities and how much climate change can be contributed solely to man-made emissions. 

Parisi, who was awarded separately, was spotlighted for his work in the 1980s that was said by the Committee to be “among the most important contributions” to the theory of complex systems. 

His work made it possible for physicists to understand apparently entirely random materials, with wide-ranging applications including mathematics, biology, and machine learning.

For the past two years, the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences has honoured findings in the field of astronomy, leading watchers to speculate it was due for a change of field. 

In 2019, Canadian-US researcher James Peebles won the award for discoveries explaining the universe’s evolution after the Big Bang, together with Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of Switzerland for the first discovery of an exoplanet.

This was followed in 2020 for work on black holes, with Britain’s Roger Penrose, Germany’s Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez of the US honoured.

– Prize ceremony cancelled –

The prestigious honour is the second Nobel of the season after the medicine prize on Monday went to a US duo David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch. 

The Nobel season continues on Wednesday with the award for chemistry, followed by the much-anticipated prizes for literature on Thursday and peace on Friday before the economics prize winds things up on Monday, October 11.

While the names of the Nobel laureates are kept secret until the last minute, the Nobel Foundation has already announced that the glittering prize ceremony and banquet held in Stockholm in December for the science and literature laureates will not happen this year due to the pandemic.

Like last year, laureates will receive their awards in their home countries.

A decision has yet to be made about the lavish Peace Prize ceremony held in Oslo on the same day.

A Russian actress and director blasted off to the International Space Station on Tuesday in a historic bid to best the United States to film the first movie in orbit.

The Russian crew is set to beat a Hollywood project that was announced last year by “Mission Impossible” star Tom Cruise together with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Actress Yulia Peresild, 37, and film director Klim Shipenko, 38, took off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan at the expected time of 0855 GMT, with docking scheduled for 1212 GMT.

“Launch as planned,” the head of the Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, said on Twitter.

Led by veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, the film crew will travel in a Soyuz MS-19 spaceship for a 12-day mission at the ISS to film scenes for “The Challenge”.

A live broadcast on Russian TV showed the Soyuz spacecraft ascending into a cloudless sky. 

“The crew is feeling well,” Shkaplerov was heard saying in the broadcast several minutes after take-off. 

The movie’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, was revealed by Roscosmos to centre around a female surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.

Shkaplerov and two other Russian cosmonauts aboard the ISS are said to have cameo roles in the film. 

The ISS crew, which also includes a French, a Japanese and three NASA astronauts, will welcome the newcomers when the hatch opens at around 1410 GMT.

– ‘It was difficult’ –

“It was difficult psychologically, physically and emotionally… but I think when we reach our goal all the challenges won’t seem so bad,” Peresild — who was selected out of 3,000 applicants for the role — said at a pre-flight press conference on Monday.

True to a pre-flight tradition religiously observed by cosmonauts, the crew said that on Sunday they watched the classic Soviet film “The White Sun of the Desert”.

Shipenko and Peresild are expected to return to Earth on October 17 in a capsule with cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who has been on the ISS for the past six months.

If successful, the mission will add to a long list of firsts for Russia’s space industry.

The Soviets launched the first satellite Sputnik, and sent the first animal, a dog named Laika, the first man, Yuri Gagarin, and the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into orbit.

But compared to the Soviet era, modern Russia has struggled to innovate and its space industry is fighting to secure state funding with the Kremlin prioritising military spending. 

Its space agency is still reliant on Soviet-designed technology and has faced a number of setbacks, including corruption scandals and botched launches.

Russia is also falling behind in the global space race, facing tough competition from the United States and China, with Beijing showing growing ambitions in the industry.

– Russians ‘lost interest’ in space –

Roscosmos was also dealt a blow after SpaceX last year successfully delivered astronauts to the ISS, costing Russia its monopoly for journeys to the orbital station. 

For political analyst Konstantin Kalachev, the space film is a matter of PR and a way to “distract” Russians from the “problems” that Roscosmos is facing.

“This is supposed to inspire Russians, show how cool we are, but I think Russians have completely lost interest in the space industry,” Kalachev told AFP.

In a bid to spruce up its image and diversify its revenue, Russia’s space programme revealed this year that it will be reviving its tourism programme to ferry fee-paying adventurers to the ISS. 

After a decade-long pause, Russia will send two Japanese tourists — including billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — to the ISS in December, capping a year that has been a milestone for amateur space travel.

Last month, SpaceX completed the first all-civilian mission to space that took four untrained astronauts on a three-day loop around the Earth’s orbit. 

The trip followed the missions of billionaire Richard Branson, who spent several minutes in weightlessness in July, and of Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos completing a similar mission just days later.

Later this month, 90-year-old actor William Shatner, known for his portrayal of Captain Kirk in the Star Trek series, will fly to space on a mission with Bezos’s Blue Origin.

A Russian actress and director blasted off to the International Space Station on Tuesday in a historic bid to best the United States to film the first movie in orbit.

The Russian crew is set to beat a Hollywood project that was announced last year by “Mission Impossible” star Tom Cruise together with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Actress Yulia Peresild, 37, and film director Klim Shipenko, 38, took off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan at the expected time of 0855 GMT, with docking expected at 1212 GMT.

Led by veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, they will travel in a Soyuz MS-19 spaceship for a 12-day mission at the ISS to film scenes for “The Challenge”.

The movie’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, was revealed by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos to centre around a female surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.

Shkaplerov and two other Russian cosmonauts aboard the ISS are said to have cameo roles in the film.

“For me, space is alluring, welcoming and has no boundaries,” Peresild — who was selected out of 3,000 candidates for the role — said in remarks broadcast by Roscosmos on Tuesday. 

Several hours ahead of take off, the trio arrived at the launchpad clad in heavy spacesuits, waving to the crowds as they boarded their spacecraft.

True to a pre-flight tradition religiously observed by cosmonauts, the crew said that on Sunday they watched the classic Soviet film “The White Sun of the Desert”.

Shipenko and Peresild are expected to return to Earth on October 17 in a capsule with cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who has been on the ISS for the past six months.

“Not only do we need to make a film, we need to come back to Earth alive,” Shkaplerov said. 

If successful, the mission will add to a long list of firsts for Russia’s space industry.

The Soviets launched the first satellite Sputnik, and sent the first animal, a dog named Laika, the first man, Yuri Gagarin, and the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into orbit.

– Russians ‘lost interest’ in space –

But compared to the Soviet era, modern Russia has struggled to innovate and its space industry is fighting to secure state funding with the Kremlin prioritising military spending. 

Its space agency is still reliant on Soviet-designed technology and has faced a number of setbacks, including corruption scandals and botched launches.

Russia is also falling behind in the global space race, facing tough competition from the United States and China, with Beijing showing growing ambitions in the industry.

Roscosmos was also dealt a blow after SpaceX last year successfully delivered astronauts to the ISS, costing Russia its monopoly for journeys to the orbital station. 

For political analyst Konstantin Kalachev, the space film is a matter of PR and a way to “distract” Russians from the “problems” that Roscosmos is facing.

“This is supposed to inspire Russians, show how cool we are, but I think Russians have completely lost interest in the space industry,” Kalachev told AFP.

In a bid to spruce up its image and diversify its revenue, Russia’s space programme revealed this year that it will be reviving its tourism programme to ferry fee-paying adventurers to the ISS. 

After a decade-long pause, Russia will send two Japanese tourists — including billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — to the ISS in December, capping a year that has been a milestone for amateur space travel.

Last month, SpaceX completed the first all-civilian mission to space that took four untrained astronauts on a three-day loop around the Earth’s orbit. 

The trip followed the missions of billionaire Richard Branson, who spent several minutes in weightlessness in July, and of Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos completing a similar mission just days later.

Later this month, 90-year-old actor William Shatner, known for his portrayal of Captain Kirk in the Star Trek series, will fly to space on a mission with Bezos’s Blue Origin.