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Agence France-Presse

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 on Thursday.
Maezawa and Hirano will travel aboard a Russian “Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft that is scheduled for launch on December 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 US billionaire Elon Musk.
Maezawa and film producer Hirano, who will be documenting the mission, will begin preflight training in June at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, a closed town outside Moscow, Roscosmos added.
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It said that the flight will last 12 days and the crew will be led by Cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.
“I’m so curious ‘what’s life like in space?’ So, I am planning to find out on my own and share with the world on my YouTube channel,” Maezawa said, as quoted by Roscosmos.
It will be the first time that two of the three spots on a Soyuz space rocket will be occupied by tourists.
The last time Roscosmos took a tourist to the ISS was in 2009, with the flight of Canadian Guy Laliberte, co-founder of Cirque du Soleil.
Roscosmos separately announced on Thursday it was sending actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko to the ISS in October with the aim of making the first feature film in space.
The film, whose working title is Challenge is being co-produced by the flamboyant head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, and state-run network Channel One.
The announcement follows one last year by Nasa which confirmed that it will be teaming up with actor Tom Cruise to make a Hollywood movie on the ISS.
The resumption of tourist flights comes as Roscosmos lost its monopoly for ferrying crews to the ISS after a reusable SpaceX rocket last year successfully delivered Nasa astronauts to space.


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FILE PHOTO: Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, founder of online fashion retailer Zozo, who has been chosen as the first private passenger by SpaceX, poses for photos as he attends a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo, Japan, October 9, 2018. REUTERS/Toru Hanai/File Photo

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The entrepreneur and his assistant Yozo Hirano will begin training in Russia next month for the 12-day trip to the ISS
Moscow is also sending an actress and a director to the ISS in October with the aim of making the first feature film in space



The entrepreneur and his assistant Yozo Hirano will begin training in Russia next month for the 12-day trip to the ISS.
