Russia sends Japanese billionaire into space

Russia is set to make a comeback in the lucrative business of orbital tourism, sending a Japanese billionaire into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). On Wednesday, December 8, the whimsical 46-year-old Yusaku Maezawa, who made his fortune in online fashion, and his assistant Yozo Hirano, are scheduled to take off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 7:38 a.m. GMT [8 h 30 à Paris]. Their flight is scheduled to last six hours, with docking to the Poisk module of the Russian segment of the ISS expected at 13:41 GMT.

They are expected to stay for twelve days in the station, on board which there are already seven people, including two Russians and a Japanese. “I am as excited as a child before a class trip”, Maezawa said at a press conference on the eve of departure. Cosmonaut Alexandre Missourkine, who will pilot the Soyuz, judged that his companions would have a busy schedule. He has planned a tournament with them ” friendly “ of badminton in zero gravity.

The billionaire, who has set himself a hundred tasks to accomplish in space, plans to video document his stay on his YouTube channel. Before that and for long weeks, he and his assistant prepared in Star City, a city built near Moscow in the 1960s to train generations of cosmonauts.

A flourishing and competitive sector

A Japanese tourist’s last trip to space dates back to 1990, when a journalist stayed aboard the Soviet Mir station. The highly profitable private space flight sector is currently boosted by the recent entry into the race of the companies of American billionaires Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), as well as that of the British Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic). In September, SpaceX hosted a three-day orbit flight with an all-amateur crew. She also plans to take several tourists around the moon in 2023, including Mr. Maezawa.

After a decade-long hiatus, Wednesday’s flight marks the return to the arena of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, as the country’s aerospace industry is plagued by corruption scandals and technical and financial difficulties.

In 2020, with the commissioning of SpaceX rockets and capsules, Russia lost its monopoly on manned flights to the ISS and the tens of millions of dollars NASA and other space agencies were paying for each seat on board. of the Soyuz. The mission of the two Japanese tourists is organized by Roscosmos and the American company Space Adventures. Between 2001 and 2009, these two partners had already sent extremely wealthy entrepreneurs into space eight times.

As a sign of the Russian space sector’s desire for a facelift, in October Roscosmos sent a director and an actress aboard the ISS to shoot the first feature film in orbit history, before a competing project of the Hollywood star Tom Cruise.