Big space travel

The film, which takes place in the near future, tells of an experiment involving three Soviet schoolchildren aged 12–13 years: Sveta Ishenova ( Lyudmila Berlin ) from Bukhara , Sasha Ivanenko ( Igor Sakharov ) from Donetsk and Fedya Druzhinin (Sergey Obrav) from Moscow . They won the All-Union competition with the participation of one hundred thousand applicants and now, having completed a course of special training, must go to the first ever children's space flight on the ship "Astra". The only adult on board will be ship captain Egor Pavlovich Kalinovsky ( Pavel Ivanov ).

The action of the film begins when the young team members are already in the space center and are waiting for the commander, who will take them to the launch pad. Kalinowski is in a room with a large TV screen where he oversees preparations for the experiment in real time. Finishing the last preparations, he talks on the phone with his son along the way and forgets his cap on the phone. Arriving by car to the rest of the team, the commander discovers his mistake and asks Fyodor to go pick up her cap while he talks to the space center employee Katerina. Fedya fulfills his request and on the screen, which Kalinowski forgot to turn off, he sees two employees of the center, one of whom says to the other: "I just learned from the general that our experiment with Astra ...". What was said further, the viewer does not show.

According to the rules, any diseased team member must be kept in isolation so as not to infect others. On the fourteenth day after the start, Kalinovsky falls ill, and a commission of doctors from the Mission Control Center orders him to go to the detention center, and the duties of the commander in his absence are assigned to Feda Druzhinin. Shortly thereafter, a gas leak occurs on the Astra. Fedya orders Sveta to remain on the bridge of the bridge, and he, along with Seryozha, goes to the engine room by an elevator. Sveta, believing that the slightest spark can lead to an explosion, turns off all electrical power on the ship, and the elevator stops. Fedya orders Sveta to go to the engine room "on the back door" to eliminate the leak. Sveta performs her task, while seeing through the translucent wall the silhouette of a moving person and hears his voice, which is reported by the boys who arrived on the elevator. They also hear a mysterious voice, Fedya declares that it is the voice of their commander, then Seryozha calls him through the intercom and makes sure that Kalinovsky did not leave the detention center.

After some time, "Astra" is experiencing a meeting with a meteorite swarm, during which it is on the verge of death. A month later, an automatic interplanetary station crashing on the ship’s path. Despite the risk of a ship leaving the orbit, Fedya decides to dock the Astra to the station, go inside and personally troubleshoot the problem. He goes to the station, finds an unsealed pipe and connects it, informs his comrades about the repair of the malfunction and his intention to return, after which the radio contact with him breaks off. Sasha goes after him to the station and also disappears. Sveta urgently contacts the Earth and receives an order to disconnect from the station and follow the set course, but after a brief meeting with Yegor Pavlovich, who is still in the isolation ward, she still goes in search of friends and falls into a trap - a closed refrigeration unit with mirrored walls. In the same place live and safe, but half frozen Fedya and Sasha are found.

Sasha proposes to find the mine of the emergency dumping of the installation, go out through it into open space and get without the spacesuit and helmet to the emergency hatch of the Astra. Who exactly will go on the deadly route - he or Fedya - must decide the toss. Sveta requires participation in the selection for general rights, but Fedya, as commander, rejects Sasha’s proposal and forbids the crew to risk their lives. In the midst of a fierce dispute, all three, to their surprise, hear from under the floor of the installation a meow of a kitten left by them on the Astra, helping them find the disguised exit and get out of the trap. Suddenly it turns out that Astra is an underground simulator simulator, and the expedition of the first three, in reality, never left the Earth, is a psychological experiment designed to study the prospects of a real children's space flight. At the same time, it turns out that Fedya accidentally found out about the real Astra mission shortly before the start, but decided to hide it from Sveta and Sasha, trying to prevent the critical experiment from failing, and Yegor Pavlovich feigned illness in order to give the young crew the opportunity to act and make choices in non-standard situations.

Despite the fact that the “big space journey” turned out to be only the last pre-flight training, all three of its participants who, at the estimated time, found their way out of the simulator and risen to the surface, are greeted like real space heroes.

In the epilogue of the film, the real cosmonaut Alexei Leonov appeals to young viewers, expressing confidence that children's space flights will soon become a reality.

Perhaps many of you guys were upset that you didn’t see a real space travel in the film. He was not - but this is only for now. Each of us, astronauts, before flying into space, did oh what a difficult job. Flight requires full of all your strength, knowledge, skills. I was in outer space for only twelve minutes , but now I can say that every minute I spent in space required annual training on Earth. But I'm sure, guys, that the time will soon come when you, if you like, will fly into space. I believe in it.

The composer Alexei Rybnikov and the poet Igor Kokhanovsky wrote several songs for the film, originally performed by the “ True friends ” band. The songs quickly gained independent popularity — already in the year of the premiere of the Big Space Journey, the circulation of records from the film, published by the all-Union record company Melodiya , exceeded 100 thousand copies ^[2] . The instrumental composition “Blue Planet”, the songs “Do you Believe Me?” And “The Milky Way” have been performed on Russian radio so far.

Song List ^[a]

The full-scale shooting of the film took place mainly in Zelenograd , near the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology ^[3] (there also takes place several episodes of Richard Viktorov ’s second film, a fantastic movie film “ Moscow - Cassiopeia ” - “ Youth in the Universe ” ^[4] , also devoted to the topic of children's space flight and filmed almost simultaneously with the "Big Space Journey", in 1973-1974). Scenes based on the training of astronauts were filmed in the estate near Marfino near Moscow.

• The names of the film (“The Big Space Journey ”) and the plays that formed the basis of its script (“The First Three, or the Year 2001 ...”) literally echo the title of the classic science fiction film by Stanley Kubrick “ A Space Odyssey of 2001 ” (1968) ^{[ 5]} . The characteristic details of the appearance of the Asters - a spherical head module, a parabolic antenna above the central section, a trapezoidal tail with three jet nozzles ^[6] - resemble similar elements of the Discovery One design. The episode with a reasonable on-board computer , opposing one of the crew members and defeated with a screwdriver, is a frank allusion to the famous scene of dismantling a HAL 9000 computer by astronaut Dave Bowman.
• Co-author of The Space Odyssey script, English writer Arthur Clarke, was friendly with the main consultant of the play Sergei Mikhalkov and the film Valentin Selivanov - Soviet pilot-cosmonaut and artist Alexei Leonov. In the name of Alexei Leonov, a spacecraft with a Soviet-American crew was named aboard A. Clarke’s novel 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), the second part of the monolith’s fantastic tetralogy, which continues some of the story lines of the first Odyssey.
• At the end of the film, Alexey Leonov is depicted working on a sketch of the painting “The Soyuz Orbital Station - Apollo” ^[7] . The docking of the Soviet and American spacecraft Soyuz-19 and Apollo under the EPAS program (with the participation of Leonov himself) was carried out on July 17, 1975 — a year after the main shootings of the Great Space Travel.
• In the original play by Sergei Mikhalkov, Sveta Ishenova is called Natasha Pechatnikova, Sasha Ivanenko is called Vadim Gontaryov ^[1] .
• Sveta Ishenova - the only film role of Lyudmila Berlin (later - a famous pianist who performed with Mstislav Rostropovich , Yuri Bashmet and Viktor Tretyakov ^[8] ).
• The commander of the ship, Yegor Pavlovich Kalinovsky, first appeared in the frame, approaching young cosmonauts on an experimental Italian car-mock-up Selena (1959, engineer-designer Luigi Segre ) ^[9] .
• Most of the bookshelves in the detention center, where Kalinowski is sitting for almost the entire experiment, are occupied by the volumes of the Brocause and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (1890-1907).
• In the film, the phrase “Calmly, Masha, I Dubrovsky” is pronounced twice; it became winged ^[10] (this way, the hero Vladislav Strzhelchik says it in the fourth minute of the movie “ Rest time from Saturday to Monday ”, filmed in 1984). There are no similar words in either Pushkin’s novel “ Dubrovsky ” or in his only film adaptation, released before 1974 (“ Dubrovsky ”, 1936). A likely prototype of the phrase is a replica of Dubrovsky, posing as Frenchman Deforge, from his dialogue with Anton Pafnutich in chapter X of the novel:

“Hush, be silent,” answered the teacher in pure Russian, “be silent, or you are lost.” I am Dubrovsky ^[11] .

• "Astra" ( Latin Astra - "Star") - the name of the spacecraft in two popular Soviet science fiction films: "The Great Space Journey" and " Through Thorns to the Stars " (1980). Music for both films was written by Alexey Rybnikov .
• The instrumental composition accompanying the final credits of the film is played in the wedding scene in the television film The Day Train (1976), the music for which was also written by Alexei Rybnikov.
• In the officially published version of The Songs of Racers, the orchestral paraphrase Preludes in C Minor ( BWV 847) from Johann Sebastian Bach’s first part of The Well-Tempered Clavier , which was not included in the original musical design of the film, twice sounds.

• Capricorn-1
• Moon plot
• Orbit 9

• C. R. “The Great Space Journey” // Soviet screen . - 1974. - № 18. - p. 10-11.

• Abibulaev, Valery. Alexey Leonov: “Mikhalkov asked me to choose the actors” (Neoprov.) . Komsomolskaya Pravda (April 2, 2009). The date of circulation is June 24, 2014. Archived on August 5, 2012.
• Great space travel (Uns.) . DVD Talk (April 5, 2009). - Review licensed DVD. Circulation date June 24, 2014. Archived June 24, 2014.
• Great space travel (Uns.) . Mielofon.ru (2002–2004). The date of circulation is June 24, 2013. Archived June 24, 2014.
• Great space travel (Uns.) . Kino-Theater.ru (December 26, 2013). Circulation date June 24, 2014. Archived June 24, 2013.
• “I, of course, believe you ... (Unsolved) . Monolith Master @ YouTube . - Participants in the filming of the film in the release of the talk show " Let Them Talk " dated April 15, 2009. The appeal date is November 7, 2018.