Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, his assistant Yozo Hirano and cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin made the trip.
Almaty, Kazakhstan:
A Japanese billionaire returned to Earth on Monday, after 12 days aboard the International Space Station, where he made videos of his mundane missions, the Russian space agency said. space includes brushing teeth and going to the toilet.
Online fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano parachuted into the Kazakh steppe at around 0313 GMT Monday, along with Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.
The “flight of the “travel” spacecraft” Soyuz MS-20 “completed,” Roscosmos said in a statement on its website, without providing an exact time for the landing.
Their journey marks Russia’s return to space tourism after a decade-long pause that has seen increased competition from the United States.
The trio spent 12 days in the orbiting lab where Japanese tourists document their daily lives on the ISS for Maezawa’s popular YouTube channel.
Speaking to his one million followers on YouTube, the 46-year-old billionaire explained how to brush his teeth and defecate in space.
In one of the videos, he explained in detail the work of self-rescue on the ISS.
“Urinating is easy,” he said, demonstrating a hand-held funnel that astronauts use to suck up their urine.
In other videos, he showed followers how to properly drink tea and sleep in zero gravity.
When the three astronauts arrived at the ISS on December 8, they joined a crew of seven who were engaged in space biology and physics research.
Maezawa plans to take eight people with him on a mission around the moon in 2023, run by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
He and his assistant are the first private Japanese citizens to visit space since journalist Toyohiro Akiyama arrived at the Mir station in 1990.
Turning point
Their return from space marked a banner year that many have seen as the turning point for private space travel.
Billionaires Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have all made groundbreaking commercial travel flights this year, tapping into a market Russia is keen to protect.
Russia has a history of sending self-sufficient tourists into space.
In partnership with US-based Space Adventures, Russian space agency Roscosmos has previously sent seven tourists to the ISS since 2001 – one of them twice.
The last one was Canada’s Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberte in 2009, who was dubbed the first clown in space.
In October, Russia launched its first untrained astronauts into space since Laliberte’s voyage, sending a Russian actress and director to the ISS, where they shot scenes for their first film. on orbit.
Moscow stopped sending tourists to space after NASA decommissioned the Space Shuttle in 2011, giving Russia a monopoly on providing the ISS.
NASA acquired all of Soyuz’s ejection seats for $90 million (€80 million) each – effectively ending tourist flights.
That changed last year when a SpaceX spacecraft successfully delivered its first astronauts to the ISS.
NASA has begun buying flights from SpaceX, stripping Russia of its monopoly and leaving its cash-strapped space agency in millions of dollars in revenue.
While the price of space tickets for tourists has not been disclosed, Space Adventures says they are in the range of $50-60 million.
Roscosmos plans to continue growing its space tourism business, having commissioned two Soyuz rockets for such trips.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
