Yusaku Maezawa, SpaceX BFR’s first private passenger, poses with a miniature rocket and space helmet prior to the start of a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo. Photo: AFP
Russia on Wednesday will send Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to the International Space Station (ISS) in a move marking Moscow’s return to the now booming space tourism business after a decade-long break.
One of Japan’s richest men, Maezawa, 46, will blast off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan accompanied by his assistant Yozo Hirano.
On Sunday morning, their Soyuz spacecraft with a Japanese flag and an “MZ” logo for Maezawa’s name was moved onto the launch pad in unusually wet weather for Baikonur, an AFP journalist saw.
The mission will end a decade-long pause in Russia’s space tourism program that has not accepted tourists since Canada’s Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberte in 2009.
However, in a historic first, the Russian space agency Roscosmos in October…