Tom Cruise to shoot film aboard International Space Station

Tom Cruise is boldly going where virtually no one has gone before: into outer space to shoot a narrative feature film.

"NASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station!" NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted Tuesday following a Deadline.com report on a collaboration between Cruise, 57, and Elon Musk's spacecraft manufacturing and launch company SpaceX. "We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA's ambitious plans a reality," Bridenstine said.

"Should be a lot of fun!” Musk, 48, tweeted in reply. Neither Cruise nor SpaceX have commented publicly. No cast or crew was announced for the planned film, to which no studio is attached, and no indication was given how much of the film would be shot in space.

While documentaries, including 2002's "Space Station 3D" and 2016's "A Beautiful Planet," have been shot aboard the International Space Station, which orbits at an average 240 miles above the Earth's surface, no fictional feature has filmed there. Space tourist Richard Garriott, a wealthy video-game designer who paid $30 million to visit the ISS in October 2008, did shoot the eight-minute short "Apogee of Fear" there with the station's Russian cosmonaut and two NASA astronauts as actors. It was released as a DVD extra on the 2012 documentary about his trip, "Man on a Mission."

A small amount of the mid-1980s USSR drama feature "Return From Orbit," about an injured space-station commander who must be evacuated to Earth, was shot aboard the Soviet Salyut-7 station and the Soyuz T-9 spacecraft.

The adventuresome Cruise is widely known for performing many of his own stunts in the "Mission: Impossible" movie franchise. For the fourth film, "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol" (2011), he did wire work 2,700 feet up the side of Dubai's Burj Khalifa Tower, the world's tallest building. For the 2015 follow-up "Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation," Cruise, secured in a digitally erased safety harness, hangs from an Airbus A400M four-engine turboprop 5,000 feet in the air.

He broke an ankle during shooting for the sixth film, 2018's "Mission: Impossible — Fallout," doing a harnessed running leap from a scaffold toward a building rooftop, where he fell short and slammed into the building's side.

While the U.S. Navy would not allow Cruise to pilot the F-18 fighter jet that his character flies in the upcoming "Top Gun: Maverick," said producer Jerry Bruckheimer to the U.K. film magazine Empire in March, the star does pilot helicopters and a World War II-era P-51 Mustang in the movie, which has been rescheduled for release from June 24 to Dec. 23.