Tom Cruise to Film Movie Aboard the International Space Station, NASA Confirms

Tom Cruise is actually going to shoot a movie in space, NASA has confirmed. A day on from a report claimed that the Mission: Impossible star was in discussions with the US government space agency, in addition to Elon Musk's SpaceX, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine revealed that Cruise would film aboard the International Space Station. The ISS is a habitable satellite, jointly developed by five space agencies including NASA, and has been occupied by humans for 19 straight years.

“NASA is excited to work with Tom Cruise on a film aboard the Space Station! We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make NASA's ambitious plans a reality,” Bridenstine wrote in a tweet on Tuesday, with a photo of the ISS. Musk, who's also said to be involved (Cruise might travel in one of SpaceX's spaceships to the ISS) replied to Bridenstine's tweet and said: “Should be a lot of fun!”

A Deadline report from Monday had originally revealed that Cruise was in the early stages of planning an action adventure movie to be shot in space, which would make it the first narrative feature movie to do so. It's not a Mission: Impossible chapter, the report added, and no film studio has boarded the project as yet. Despite the appeal of being the first film made in space, getting backing will take a bit of convincing, given the astronomical budgetary concerns of filming in space.

Before he zooms off to space, Cruise will be seen in the Top Gun sequel Top Gun: Maverick, delayed to December 2020 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. His last film was Mission: Impossible – Fallout, the terrific sixth chapter in the M:I franchise, to which he is committed for at least two more entries. Filming is paused on M:I 7 and unlikely to resume for a while, since it was shooting in Italy when the pandemic swept the globe and forced a third of the world into lockdown.

Cruise has a history of taking on high-concept stunts and doing them himself. For Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, he scaled the world's tallest building, Dubai's Burj Khalifa. For Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Cruise hung onto the side of a plane. And for Fallout, he performed a HALO (high altitude, low opening) jump 106 times for a sequence.

Can Netflix force Bollywood to reinvent itself? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS. You can also download the episode or just hit the play button below.