By Eurasia Business News – May 13, 2021

View on the International space station, started in 1998. Placed in low earth orbit, the station is permanently occupied by an international crew dedicated to the scientific research in the space environment. Source : Pixabay.

The Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano will be the next tourists to stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS), announced the Russian space agency Roscosmos which will put the two men in orbit in December. 

They will reach the ISS with the Russian Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft, whose the launch is scheduled on December 8, 2021.

“The duration of the space flight will be 12 days, the crew commander will be the Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Missourkine,” reported the Russian Space Agency on its website.

Roscosmos cooperates with Space Adventures Ltd since the flight of the first space tourist in 2001. To date, seven space tourists have visited the station and paid for their flight. Yusaku Maezawa will be the eighth tourist and the first space tourist from Japan.

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In June 2021, Yusaku Maezawa, as part of the crew, will begin preflight training, which will take about three months and will be held at the Cosmonaut Training Center Yuri Gagarin in the Star City, in the Moscow region.

“I am very interested in what it is like to be in space. So I personally plan to find out and share my impressions with the world on my YouTube channel,” Yusaku Maezawa said.

In 1998, Maezawa founded Japan’s largest online fashion store, Zozotown. In September 2019, it became known that he had decided to sell most of his stake in the Yahoo Japan store for $ 3.7 billion. Forbes estimated Maezawa’s fortune at $ 2 billion.

The opportunities for orbital space tourism are limited and expensive, the Russian space agency Roscosmos being currently the only on to provide transport to the International Space Station (ISS) for private tourists. The price for a space flight organized by the company Space Adventures Ltd, to the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft is about USD 20-35 million.

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