It’s official: Tom Cruise will ("hopefully") be the first civilian to do a spacewalk

In a recent Variety piece, William Shatner wrote that going to space “was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered,” and that the experience “filled me with overwhelming sadness.” “[When] I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold … all I saw was death,” he shared. Anyway, gather ’round for a fun update on Tom Cruise’s space movie!

“Tom Cruise is taking us to space. He’s taking the world to space. That’s the plan,” Universal Filmed Entertainment Group chairwoman Donna Langley recently confirmed to the BBC. “We have a great project in development with Tom, that does contemplate him doing just that. Taking a rocket up to the space station and shooting and hopefully being the first civilian to do a spacewalk outside of the space station.”

The blast-off portion of the program will only be a small snippet of the Doug Liman-directed film, which “actually [mostly] takes place on earth, and then the character needs to go up to space to save the day.” Langley describes Cruise’s character as “a down-on-his-luck guy who finds himself in the position of being the only person who could save Earth.”

The project has long been gestating, first reported as a possibility in 2020 as a collaboration between Cruise, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and NASA. At the time, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted a confirmation (per Deadline) of the organization’s involvement, adding, “We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA’s ambitious plans a reality.” Somewhat ominous, no? What intergalactic plans is NASA cooking up over there? One might recall the words of space traveler William Shatner: “I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.”