Room Vacationer: Japanese Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to Travel to ISS in December

Japanese billionaire entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano will be the subsequent travellers to journey to the Global Place Station (ISS), Russia’s space agency Roscosmos stated Thursday.

Maezawa and Hirano will travel aboard a Russian “Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft that is scheduled for launch on December 8, 2021 from the Baikonur cosmodrome” in Kazakhstan, the agency mentioned in a statement.

Maezawa, 45, who produced his fortune in online retail, also ideas to participate in a 2023 mission all over the moon aboard a Starship spacecraft of SpaceX, the Roscosmos rival of US billionaire Elon Musk. 

Maezawa and movie producer Hirano, who will be documenting the mission, will commence pre-flight education in June at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Teaching Centre in Star Town, a shut town exterior of Moscow, Roscosmos included.

It stated that the flight will final 12 times and the crew will be led by Cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.

“I am so curious ‘what’s lifestyle like in place?’ So, I am scheduling to find out on my individual and share with the globe on my YouTube channel,” Maezawa said, as quoted by Roscosmos.

It will be the initial time that two of the three spots on a Soyuz room rocket will be occupied by travellers.

The very last time Roscosmos took a tourist to the ISS was in 2009, with the flight of Canadian Man Laliberte, co-founder of Cirque du Soleil. 

The resumption of these vacationer flights will come as Roscosmos misplaced its monopoly for ferrying crews to the ISS soon after a reusable SpaceX rocket previous 12 months successfully sent NASA astronauts to place.