Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa salutes on December 8, 2021 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, before boarding a Russian rocket for a stay aboard the International Space Station (POOL / Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV)
A Japanese billionaire arrived aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday after traveling with a Russian capsule, a mission that marks Moscow’s return to orbital tourism after struggles.
This sector, in which Russia has lost ground against private American companies, notably Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is experiencing renewed interest and constitutes a potential financial windfall.
The whimsical Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, a 46-year-old online fashion heavyweight, his assistant Yozo Hirano and cosmonaut Alexander Missourkine, who brought them to their destination, boarded the ISS at 4:11 p.m. GMT, according to images broadcast by the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos).
Their Soyuz capsule docked at the orbital station at 1:40 p.m. GMT, six hours after taking off from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
In the morning, the billionaire, his assistant and the cosmonaut had left their hotel in Baikonur all smiles to the sound of a Soviet song that is traditionally played for all cosmonauts before the flight. This hymn – about cosmonauts nostalgic for their home – was partially sung in Japanese.
“Dreams do come true,” Mr. Maezawa tweeted Wednesday morning.
When the rocket took off from Baikonur, illuminating the gray sky with orange flames, a crowd of relatives of the billionaire from Japan on the occasion frantically applauded.
“It was very touching, I almost cried,” said Ryo Okubo, 46, who is in charge of Mr. Maezawa’s space projects.
The stay of the two space tourists in the orbital station will be documented by Mr. Hirano for and with his boss on YouTube.
The Soyuz MS-20 rocket carrying Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa takes off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on December 8, 2021 (AFP / Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV)
The billionaire has set himself 100 tasks to accomplish in space.
Cosmonaut Alexandre Missourkine has planned a “friendly” weightless badminton tournament with his companions.
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.
– “To fight” –
A Japanese tourist’s previous trip to space dates back to 1990, when a journalist stayed aboard the Soviet Mir station.
The very lucrative private space flight sector is currently being 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) .
The head of the Russian Space Agency Dmitry Rogozin stands on December 8, 2021 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, in front of the rocket that will send Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa into space (POOL / SHAMIL ZHUMATOV)
In September, SpaceX hosted a three-day orbit flight with an all-amateur crew, and plans to take several tourists around the moon in 2023, including Mr. Maezawa, who is funding the operation.
After a decade-long hiatus, Wednesday’s flight marks the return to the Roscosmos arena, as Russia’s aerospace industry is plagued by corruption scandals and technical and financial difficulties.
In 2020, with the commissioning of SpaceX rockets and capsules, this country lost its monopoly on manned flights to the ISS and the tens of millions of euros that NASA and other space agencies were paying for each seat. aboard the Soyuz.
“We are not going to leave this niche (of orbital tourism) to the Americans. We are ready to fight,” Roscomos director Dmitri Rogozine said on Wednesday.
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 together sent extremely wealthy entrepreneurs into space, eight times.
“It’s great (…) to share this great adventure” with Mr. Maezawa, Tom Shelley, president of Space Adventures, present in Baikonur, told AFP shortly after takeoff.
A sign of the rediscovered ambitions of the Russian space sector, Roscosmos also sent in October a director and an actress aboard the ISS to shoot the first feature film in orbit history, before a competing project by Hollywood star Tom Cruise.
acl / gkg / mr