James Cameron to Stay Put

By Stephen M. Silverman

07/16/1998 at 12:00 AM EDT

Forget those stories from last week that "Titanic" director James Cameron plans to zoom up to the Russian space station Mir. Rae Sanchini, the president of the filmmaker's Lightstorm Entertainment Inc., tells PEOPLE.com that Cameron "has no current plans to blast off on any U.S. or Russian launch vehicle." The report, which presumably came from a Russian news agency, said that Cameron had trained with cosmonauts and was plotting to join them light years away. "Jim has taken a number of research trips to various NSA installations, as well as a single trip to Moscow in support of three interrelated projects . . . concerning a hypothetical first manned mission to Mars," says Sanchini. "As our central characters are astronauts and cosmonauts, as part of his research Jim has participated in certain testing, training and other exercises that an astronaut or cosmonauts would undergo. However, this is all research, and Jim has no current plans to blast off on any U.S. or Russian launch vehicle."