Japanese businessman and billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano will be the next tourists to travel to the International Space Station (ISS), Russian space agency Roscosmos said Thursday.
Maezawa and Hirano will travel in the Russian Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft scheduled for launch on December 8, 2021 from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the agency said in a statement.
Maezawa, 45, who benefits from the online retail business, also plans to participate in a lunar mission in 2023 aboard Starship's SpaceX spacecraft, a rival to US billionaire Elon Musk's Roscosmos.
Maezawa and Hirano, who will document the mission, will begin pre-flight training in June at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, a closed city outside Moscow. They also said that the flight would last 12 days and the crew would be led by Cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.
"I was very curious about 'what is life like in outer space?' So, I plan to find out for myself and share with the world through my YouTube channel, "said Maezawa, as quoted by Roscosmos.
This will be the first time that two of the three spots on the Soyuz space rocket have been occupied by tourists. The last time Roscosmos took tourists to the ISS was in 2009, with a flight from Guy Laliberte from Canada, a co-founder of Cirque du Soleil.
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