An Ode to The World’s Unluckiest Astronaut: He Trained for 14 Years to Go Into Space, Only to Be Replaced by an Actress

Russian cosmonaut Andrei Babkin spent 14 years preparing to go into space. However, he lost his last chance to the 2023 movie The Challenge, which was filmed on the International Space Station (ISS).

Babkin had dedicated half his life to the Russian space industry as a systems engineer when, in April 2010, he was selected to join his country’s astronaut corps. Years later, Russian space agency Roscosmos eventually assigned him to Expedition 59/60 to the ISS.

However, he never had the opportunity to fly due to crew cutbacks caused by the delay of the Russian orbital segment’s Nauka module.

In April 2019, Babkin renewed his training to participate in Expedition 63 to the ISS. His planned companions on the flight were Russia’s Nikolai Tikhonov and Japan’s Akihiko Hoshide aboard a Soyuz spacecraft.

But he didn’t fly that time, either. Tikhonov suffered an accidental eye injury, and given that Roscosmos had an established practice of changing the entire crew when one member couldn’t deploy, Babkin was reassigned to the backup crew.

In May 2020, Babkin and Mukhtar Aimakhanov were selected for Expedition 66 and trained for a year to fly to the ISS on a Soyuz commanded by Anton Shkaplerov.

In this case, though, the third time wasn’t the charm. Babkin and Aimakhanov were unexpectedly replaced by actress Yulia Peresild and film director Klim Shipenko, who flew on Soyuz MS-19 to shoot a movie on the ISS.

Peresild and Shipenko trained for a period of four months. The director mentioned in an interview the day before flying into space that people don’t need to spend a year preparing for the flight and that it can be accomplished in four months instead.

With a budget of 1.246 billion rubles ($14 million), the movie The Challenge managed to recoup this amount after its release, grossing more than 2 billion rubles ($22 million).

After years of waiting in the wings, Babkin’s career as a cosmonaut has come to an end. The management team at the Cosmonaut Training Center stated that he has reached his “expiration date.” According to the Russian outlet Gazeta.Ru, he’s been offered the position of deputy science commander in exchange for resigning from the manned flight corps.

At 55 years old, the man who has spent 14 years training to go to space has been forced to step down. Why? According to the same source, Babkin was suffering from bilateral pansinusitis, or chronic nasal congestion.

Although the cosmonaut underwent surgery to treat this condition and was cleared to fly in 2022, Russia has decided not to keep him on the team. When all’s said and done, Babkin certainly has an interesting story: Another cosmonaut with an eye injury, a movie, and a persistent cold prevented him from going to space.

Image | NASA

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