A Russian actor and director have arrived at the International Space Station in an attempt to beat the US and film the first movie in orbit. The Russian crew are likely to beat a Hollywood project announced last year by Tom Cruise, Nasa and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The actor Yulia Peresild, 37, and film director Klim Shipenko, 38, took off from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as scheduled. They belatedly docked at the ISS at 12.22 GMT after the 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. Roscosmos revealed that the film’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, centred on a female surgeon 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 and a Japanese citizen and three Nasa astronauts, will welcome the newcomers when the hatch opens at around 14.10 GMT. “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 White Sun of the Desert. Shipenko and Peresild are expected to return to Earth on 17 October in a capsule with the cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who has been on the ISS for the past six months. A Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said: “Space is where we became pioneers, where despite everything we maintain a fairly confident position.” 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. The country’s space agency is still reliant on Soviet-designed technology and has faced a number of setbacks, including corruption scandals and botched launches. Russia is falling behind in the global space race, facing tough competition from the US and China, with Beijing showing growing ambitions in the industry. Roscosmos was dealt a blow after SpaceX last year successfully took astronauts to the ISS, costing Russia its monopoly for journeys to the orbital station. For Konstantin Kalachev, a political analyst, the space film is a matter of PR and a way to distract Russians from the problems 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 said. In an effort to spruce up its image and diversify its revenue, Russia revealed this year it would be reviving its space tourism programme to ferry fee-paying adventurers to the ISS. After a decade-long pause, it will send two Japanese tourists, including the 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, taking four astronauts on a three-day loop of the Earth’s orbit. The trip followed the missions of Richard Branson, who spent several minutes in weightlessness in July, and Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, who completed a similar mission days later. This month William Shatner, now 90 and known for his portrayal of Captain Kirk in the Star Trek series, will fly to space on a mission with Bezos’s Blue Origin.