A Russian Soyuz spacecraft is due to take a Japanese billionaire to the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday. Moscow is making its mark in the lucrative orbiting tourism market.
This flight, which will depart from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, comes at a crucial time for the Russian aerospace industry, which has been undermined for years by scandals and faced with competition from private American players.
Last year, billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX company began taking passengers to the ISS, ending the lucrative monopoly that the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) had previously held.
Fashion billionaire
Roscosmos therefore hopes to open a new chapter by sending on the ISS the whimsical Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, 46 years old and who made his fortune in online fashion, and his assistant Yozo Hirano on the ISS.
The aircraft will be piloted by a seasoned Russian cosmonaut, Alexander Missurkin, who has already carried out two missions aboard the ISS.
The two Japanese tourists will stay 12 days aboard the orbital station, where they plan to shoot videos that will be published. on the billionaire’s YouTube channel, which has more than 750,000 subscribers.
Badminton in space
Maezawa also said he has a “list of almost 100 tasks” he wants to accomplish aboard the station, including playing badminton in space.
For several weeks, the two Japanese trained in Star City, a city built near Moscow in the 1960s to train generations of Soviet and now Russian cosmonauts.
Adorned with a Japanese flag, the Soyuz spacecraft which is to take them into space was dispatched to the firing point on Sunday morning under a rainy sky.
This mission, organized by Roscosmos and its American partner Space Adventures, will mark Russia’s return to the space tourism race, after more than a decade of hiatus. Roscosmos and Space Adventures had already collaborated between 2001 and 2009 to send extremely wealthy entrepreneurs into space eight times. The most recent was the founder of Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian Guy Laliberté.
Space tourism
Symbol of the growing ambitions related to space, Elon Musk’s company plans to take several tourists around the moon in 2023. Mr. Maezawa, who finances this operation, will also be on the trip.
Other private players are also in the ranks, such as the Blue Origin company of Amazon founder, American billionaire Jeff Bezos, which organized two trips. Or Virgin Galactic, by British billionaire Richard Branson, who took a flight in zero gravity in July.
Moscow, which competed with the United States for the conquest of space during the Cold War, seems determined to regain its rank as a leading space power after years of disappointment. Corruption and technical problems have indeed tarnished the reputation of the sector.
As a sign of its desire for a facelift, Roscosmos sent in October a director and an actress aboard the ISS to shoot the first feature film in history in orbit, before a competing project by Tom Cruise.
