This trip marks the return of Russia in spatial tourism after a hiatus of a decade.
Le Monde with AFP
Yusaku Maezawa has finished with her stay in space. The Japanese billionaire, accompanied by his Yozo Hirano assistant and the Russian cosmonaut Alexander Missourrkine, landed after spending twelve days aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
“The flight from the” tourist “spatial vessel” Soyuz MS-20 is over, “said Russian Space Agency Roscosmos in a statement published on his website. The landing was around 4:13 am, Time of Paris, Monday, in the Kazakhstan steppe.
Images of the landing site, about 150 kilometers southeast of Zhezkazgan City, in the center of Kazakhstan, showed the smiling trio after being helped out of the Soyuz descent module and mounting In evacuation vehicles, in the cold and the haze. “The crew feels good,” said NASA TV commentator, translating comments from the control of the Russian mission. According to the Central Military District press service, they had to be welcomed upon arrival with a “surprise” dish of noodles from Japan.
Videos on everyday life in space
The 46-year-old Japanese billionaire, a heavyweight of online fashion, has set a hundred tasks list during his stay in the ISS. The assistant of Mr. Maezawa made videos on the daily life in orbit for the account YouTube of billionaire.
You can see the man explain in detail to his million Followers how to brush the teeth or go to the toilet in weightlessness. “Peeing is very easy,” he says in one of the videos, showing the tool used by astronauts to suck the urine. In another, it prepares a tea without sugar and boasts the tasty cookies of the ISS.
This trip marks the return of Russia in spatial tourism after a hiatus of a decade. Mr. Maezawa and his assistant are the first Japanese tourists in space since 1990, when a journalist had stayed aboard the Soviet Mir station.
The private spatial private flights, is currently boosted by the recent entry into the US $ 1 billionaire companies (Spacex) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), as well as that of the British Richard Branson ( Virgin Galactic).
In September, Spacex organized a three-day flight in orbit with a crew fully consisting of amateurs. It also plans to take several tourists to go around the moon in 2023, including Mr. Maezawa, which finances this operation.
Back in the arena
This return in the Roscosmos arena intervenes as the aerospace industry in Russia is undermined by corruption scandals and technical and financial difficulties. In 2020, with the commissioning of spacex rockets and capsules, Moscow lost its monopoly of inhabited flights to the ISS and tens of millions of euros that NASA and other space agencies paid for each place to Soyuz edge.
The mission of the two Japanese tourists is organized by Roscosmos and its American partner Space Adventures. Between 2001 and 2009, these two groups had already sent richissimes entrepreneurs in space, eight times. The last was, in 2009, the Canadian Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil.
Sign of regulated ambitions of the Russian space sector, Roscosmos also dispatched in October a director and an actress aboard the ISS to turn the first feature film in orbit, before a competitor project of the Hollywood star Tom Cruise.