MISSION POSSIBLE?

The announcement that Tom Cruise will team up with NASA to shoot a movie in space has excited the film community – but the project presents some out of the world technical challenges.

For one thing, shooting on the International Space Station – which is the plan for the so far untitled movie - is not like filming on any other set.

Blocking a scene and completing the shots in zero gravity is much more difficult because orbital dynamics mean you move in an entirely different way.

Plus calling “quiet on set” is impossible due to the constant buzz and hum of the equipment on the ISS.

Getting star Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman up there, most likely on a SpaceX rocket, is just the first part of the mission – making the actual movie comes with a whole other set of problems.

But Cruise has always sought for spectacle in his work and this project is the ultimate adventure to crown his action career.

The time it will take to work out all the technical challenges is part of the reason why no start date has been announced for the film but there is certainly a will to get it made from the technological community as well as the film world.

And NASA are helping every step of the way. The space agency has taken a much greater role in films lately having co-operated with dozens of films, TV shows and documentaries in just the last three years, including First Man, The Martian and Apollo 11.

Cruise is a space enthusiast having played an astronaut in the film Oblivion and narrated an Imax documentary called Space Station 3D but the Mission Impossible star will truly blast into the history books if he call pull off this ambitious project.

—Sandro Monetti