When a young director Vasily ZhuravlEv started working for Mosfilm, he decided to make a film about flying to the moon. The idea was approved, and a letter was sent ‘to Tsiolkovsky in Kaluga (the exact address was not known) asking to participate in the creation of the film. Tsiolkovsky agreed and asked to come in a few days with a doll and paper. The letter also contained the work of Tsiolkovsky “Outside the Earth”. The film crew was perplexed: paper is understandable, but why would Tsiolkovsky need a doll?

At the meeting the film makers were interested in everything was interesting: the general outlines of the rocket plane, the cabin of the spacecraft, how the rocket is launched and how it flies, how to show the “world without gravity” and landing on the Moon, what the person feels on the Moon and when he returns to the Earth.

The doll was also useful: with its help, the scientist explained how a person moves in weightlessness and on the Moon. Tsiolkovsky talked about how liquid, objects, people behave in these conditions.

The director recalled: “Never in my long life have I met such a consultant who not only knows the subject, but who is passionate, endowed with a vivid, figurative, I would say, cinematic vision. In his imagination he saw our film even before us and lead us there”.

After the trip to Kaluga, work at the studio began. Tsiolkovsky reviewed the sketches of the sets and made comments on the color solution of the sky and the stars, the size, color and brightness of the Earth and the position of the Sun on the moon sky, the solar corona, the shadows on the moon.

All the actions of the heroes had to take place in plausible conditions. For the first time in cinema, they managed to depict the state of a person in zero gravity. Thanks to the Tsiolkovsky film “Space Flight” became an illustration of the conquest of space in the future, which the scientist predicted many years before the first human flight into space. Saying goodbye to the film crew, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said: “Well, now you can go on a space film trip”.

The work on the film lasted 2 years. Tsiolkovsky drew more than 30 drawings for filming. They were filled with calculations, diagrams in which a scientist even depicted, for the camera crew, how an astronaut should go out through the hatch of a ship without depressurizing the cabin, how it would move around the rocket in space. These drawings to the film were combined in the “Album of Space Travel”, published in 1947. A lot of what astronauts are doing in space today was described by Tsiolkovsky: the space station’s observation window, going into outer space through the airlock chamber, growing plants under weightless conditions, and so on. The scientist did not see the film version of his dream. He did not live to see the premiere for four months. The film was released on national screens in January 1936 and was a stunning success.