Japanese billionaire entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano would be the subsequent vacationers to journey to the International Space Station (ISS), Russia’s area company Roscosmos mentioned Thursday.
Maezawa and Hirano will journey aboard a Russian “Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft that is scheduled for launch on December 8, 2021 from the Baikonur cosmodrome” in Kazakhstan, the company mentioned in a press release.
Maezawa, 45, who made his fortune in on-line retail, additionally plans to take part in a 2023 mission across the moon aboard a Starship spacecraft of SpaceX, the Roscosmos rival of US billionaire Elon Musk.Â
Maezawa and movie producer Hirano, who will probably be documenting the mission, will start pre-flight coaching in June on the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, a closed city outdoors of Moscow, Roscosmos added.
It mentioned that the flight will final 12 days and the crew will probably be led by Cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.
“I’m so curious ‘what’s life like in space?’ So, I am planning to find out on my own and share with the world on my YouTube channel,” Maezawa mentioned, as quoted by Roscosmos.
It would be the first time that two of the three spots on a Soyuz area rocket will probably be occupied by vacationers.
The final time Roscosmos took a vacationer to the ISS was in 2009, with the flight of Canadian Guy Laliberte, co-founder of Cirque du Soleil.Â
The resumption of those vacationer flights comes as Roscosmos misplaced its monopoly for ferrying crews to the ISS after a reusable SpaceX rocket final yr efficiently delivered NASA astronauts to area.
