The Mir, a Soviet space station put into orbit around the earth in 1986, was a vital source of pride for Russians in the 1990s, as they grappled with the brutal realities of the collapse of the USSR. As retired NASA spaceflight specialist and Soviet and Russian space activities historian James Oberg puts it, the craft “was their last hurrah as an independent space power — the pinnacle of their nearly half century run since [they launched] Sputnik.” But it was also only built to stay in orbit for five years and incredibly expensive to operate. Accidents and maintenance needs piled up on the aging station, Russian space operations budgets tanked and foreign powers gave up interest in renting out the Mir in favor of the new International Space Station sent into orbit in 1998. Slowly, Russia resigned itself to the reality that it would have to decommission its symbol of extraplanetary pride, letting it fall into the Pacific.
But in late 1997, Russian director Yuri Kara approached the Mir’s custodians with an idea: He’d pay a hefty sum to send two actors to the station in 2000 to shoot scenes for a film, to be released in 2001 on the 40th anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight. An ode to the Russian space program, the film might galvanize support for the craft. Kara openly acknowledged that he’d need about $30 million just to shoot on the Mir, and a total budget of about $200 million, tying Titanic as the most expensive film ever shot at that point. Oh, and a number of the shoots would reportedly be sex scenes.
Kara never got to make his steamy sci-fi romance before the Mir deorbited in 2001. Yet outlandish as his plot may sound, he got close to making it a reality. His is the story of a 20-year-old near miss that makes modern private space ventures feel less fanciful than they’re often portrayed as being.
Kara openly acknowledged that he’d need about $30 million just to shoot on the Mir, and a total budget of about $200 million, tying Titanic as the most expensive film ever shot at that point.
Kara’s proposal didn’t come entirely out of left field. Starved for capital, Russian authorities had been courting private funding for the Mir for years, and by 1997 had allowed its cosmonauts to endorse everything from Israeli milk to Pepsi Cola in commercials shot on the station to score a little scratch. America actively encouraged these ventures, eager to keep Russian scientists laboring on the station lest they go seek employment on Iranian or Libyan missile projects — even as NASA officially opposed commercial activities in space that would utilize their assets. (Until 1998, that is, when the United States officially started calling for the decommissioning of the Mir, worrying that scrabbling to keep it afloat would distract Russia from its commitments to work with Americans on the ISS.)
Although the world’s space agencies deny that anyone has ever had actual, or even simulated, sex in space, filmic eroticism wasn’t unprecedented on the Mir either. As of the mid-1990s, the station reportedly had a library of French and Italian hard R and soft X films to help lonely cosmonauts deal with the sexual strains of long stays, which could last well upwards of a year.
Oberg argues that Kara, MirCorp, and others’ projects didn’t fall apart because their progenitors were inept or they were un-fundable, but because Russian space officials were never totally comfortable with capitalist funding proposals. “John Denver tried to interest them in flying him [to the Mir] in the mid-‘90s with the promise of granting them commercial rights to the songs he would compose and perform during a week in space,” he notes. But “the Russians' inflexibly required cash up front, [not] realizing that the album sales… would in the long run very likely have far exceeded the ticket price they demanded.” Kara reportedly tried to sell them on similar a little up front, a lot later arguments, but they fell on deaf ears.
THE PLAN TO SHOOT A STEAMY ROMANCE
IN SPACE
Story by Mark Hay
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE
Director Yuri Kara had stars in his eyes.
Then he reportedly tried to talk everyone from Emma Thompson to John Travolta to Tom Hanks into joining the cast. He openly acknowledged that it would have been much cheaper to just use special effects, insisting in the press that the authenticity of filming in space would be worth the cost.
It is easy now, as it was in the late ‘90s, to write Kara’s proposal off as a PR stunt, an unfeasible idea with no clear backers that wound up having a hard time hiring actors, and lost two women it did recruit fairly quickly. But he did manage to get Russian leading man Vladimir Steklov onboard and through cosmonaut training, as well as British producer John Daly — best known for his work on films like Platoon and The Terminator — and actually scheduled a flight to and 45 day stay on the Mir for Steklov and two cosmonauts trained to use film equipment for March 31, 2000.
He only got that far because he’d gotten lucky, though. Russia was ready to decommission the Mir before that flight, until American investors set up MirCorp, a private company that wanted to use the station for space tourism, in January 2000 and infused the craft with millions in cash.
In the end, disputes about payments got Steklov booted from his flight weeks before launch. The cosmonaut film crew still went up to do maintenance on the station in case Kara, MirCorp, or anyone else got a juicy project together. But MirCorp plans to send investor Dennis Tito to the Mir as the first ever commercial space tourist in 2001 fell through. As did talks in 2000 between Survivor creator Mark Burnett and Moscow authorities about sending the winner of a new reality TV show, Destination: Mir, to the station. (If these talks, which Oberg worked on, had not failed, Burnett may well have focused on this ambitious project instead of reviving Donald Trump’s public image with actual post-Survivor project, 2004’s The Apprentice.) Russia threw in the towel and brought down the Mir in March 2001, before Kara or anyone else could bounce back.
Oberg argues that Kara, MirCorp, and others’ projects didn’t fall apart because their progenitors were inept or they were un-fundable, but because Russian space officials were never totally comfortable with capitalist funding proposals. “John Denver tried to interest them in flying him [to the Mir] in the mid-‘90s with the promise of granting them commercial rights to the songs he would compose and perform during a week in space,” he notes. But “the Russians' inflexibly required cash up front, [not] realizing that the album sales … would in the long run very likely have far exceeded the ticket price they demanded.” Kara reportedly tried to sell them on similar a little up front, a lot later arguments, but they fell on deaf ears.
After Kara’s failure, no one has seriously attempted to shoot a feature film in space, much less a softcore sci-fi romance. In some ways, it may actually be harder to organize such a venture today than it was for him in the late ‘90s. NASA only opened its space on the ISS up to private, commercial ventures last year, notes Alan Ladwig, another NASA retiree and current space tourism entrepreneur and writer, and the cost of getting a film crew and actors up there would likely exceed Kara’s budget, even when adjusted for inflation. Filmmakers also have access to ever better and cheaper special effects, he points out, as well as companies that can cheaply create microgravity conditions for actors using parabolic flights. That would likely make selling investors on a space production even harder than it was for Kara. Which is why, when Pornhub created a crowd funding campaign to shoot a hard X movie in space in 2015, most everyone just shrugged it off as laughable clickbait.
However, Oberg and others have faith that commercial space flight costs will lower drastically in the coming years, as space facilities become easier for civilians to use. That, he suggests, may make prestige projects, or even high end softcore films looking for a constant zero G gimmick, viable (again). And Kara is still kicking around. So there’s a chance he could make his big, steamy project a reality in the end — just in time for the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s mission into the void and on the ISS, instead of the 40th on the Mir, as he’d planned.
Director Yuri Kara attempted to go where no man had gone before.
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The MIR, 1996.
Source: Getty
Still, Kara’s project seemed odd and bold. He based the script on Tavro Kassandry, a 1996 book by the Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov that tells the tale of a cosmonaut who refuses to leave the Mir when Russia decides to scupper it. He dubs himself a space monk and sends messages to earth claiming that fetuses can see the future and, recognizing the wicked, doomed world they will be born into, want to be aborted — a choice he says they make clear by causing a mark to appear on their mothers’ foreheads. He then uses space rays to make that mark glaringly clear. But when earth’s citizens refuse to heed his warnings of doom and kill one of his colleagues in the U.S., he commits suicide by stepping out of the Mir airlock. According to Joseph Mozur, who knew Aitmatov and has studied his oeuvre, the book is not only unrelentingly dark and dismal, but it is also not one of Aitmatov’s strongest, even among those that deal with space projects. Yet Kara reportedly flipped it into an optimistic and sexy script, inventing a storyline in which the Russians and Americans decide to send the cosmonaut's old love interest to the Mir to bring him back to earth.
Right, Commemorative Soviet (USSR) poster depicting the Mir space station. Left, Cosmonaut Valeri Korzun on the Mir space station.
Source: Getty