Japanese billionaire Maezawa to travel to ISS in December

May 13, 2021 | News On Japan

May 13, 2021 (Japan Times) - MOSCOW – Japanese billionaire entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant, Yozo Hirano, will be the next tourists to travel to the International Space Station (ISS), Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said Thursday.

Maezawa and Hirano will travel aboard a Russian “Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft that is scheduled for launch on Dec. 8, 2021, from the Baikonur cosmodrome” in Kazakhstan, the agency said in a statement.

Maezawa, 45, who made his fortune in online retail, also plans to participate in a 2023 mission around the moon aboard a Starship spacecraft of SpaceX, the Roscosmos rival of U.S. billionaire Elon Musk.

Maezawa and film producer Hirano, who will be documenting the mission, will begin pre-flight training in June at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, a closed town outside of Moscow, Roscosmos added.

It said that the flight will last 12 days and the crew will be led by Cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.

Source: ANNnewsCH

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