Tom Cruise will film his next Hollywood blockbuster on location — 250 miles up in the air and orbiting the Earth once every 90 minutes.
The “Top Gun” star will be flying through the stratosphere shooting an as-yet-unknown film aboard the International Space Station (ISS), NASA said on Tuesday.
The space agency’s director Jim Bridenstine confirmed the news on Twitter, saying he was excited that the move would “inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists” to work on space travel.
Cruise, 56, famously still does his own cliff-hanging, car-rolling stunts.
He got his commercial piloting license after his role in Top Gun as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a hotshot U.S. Navy pilot who has a dangerous and reckless flying style, and reportedly flew some aircraft in the long-awaited sequel to the 1986 classic due later this year.
But if his latest daring project goes ahead, Cruise will be the first Hollywood A-lister to appear onscreen from outside the planet’s atmosphere.
Entertainment website Deadline Hollywood first reported rumors of the film shoot over the weekend, adding that tech mogul Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture was attached to the project.
SpaceX is slated to launch astronauts to space from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade later this month aboard the Crew Dragon, which would dock with the ISS.
Musk and SpaceX have yet to confirm their involvement in the film venture, but Musk responded to Bridenstine’s tweet with one of his own, saying it “should be a lot of fun.”
Deadline Hollywood said there were few other details known about the movie project but reported it won’t be part of Cruise’s box office hit franchise “Mission: Impossible.”
The seventh film in that series is set to hit screens next year following a production delay due to the coronavirus pandemic.
