Russia sends the Japanese billionaire to the International Space Station as a space tourist | Science and Planet
Russia will launch Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa with his assistant Yuzu Hirano to the International Space Station in December. The Russian Space Agency Roscosmos announced this today. They are the space tourists coming from Space Adventures, a company that specializes in space tourism.
The duo will depart from Baikonur, Kazakhstan on December 8 with a Soyuz MS-20 for a twelve-day flight. Captain Soyuz is Russian professional astronaut Alexander Mysorkin “I am very interested in what it means to be in space. So I intend to know my personal impressions and share them with the world on my YouTube channel,” Roscosmos quotes from the Japanese. The amount he paid was not revealed.
The Japanese will start a three-month training course at Star City near Moscow in June. Space Adventure confirms that for the first time, two space tourists are making a trip with the same spaceship at the same time. It’s also ten years after his last space travel expedition.
The company has been working with Roscosmos since the flight of the first space tourist, American, Dennis Tito, in 2001. So far, seven tourists have visited the space station and paid for their trips themselves. Yusaku Maezawa will be the eighth and first from Japan.
First about the moon
Yusaku Maezawa, 45, is CEO of Start Today, which he founded in 1998. Zozotown launched an online fashion retail site in 2004 and is now the largest in Japan. He is also known as an art collector. The Japanese will also become the first tourist to fly around the moon, with SpaceX’s Starship of America. It won’t be until 2023.
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