Japanese billionaire returns to Earth after 12 days aboard the ISS

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During this tourist stay in space, the fashion giant Yusaku Maezawa was accompanied by his assistant and a Russian cosmonaut.

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End of the trip. The whimsical Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, a 46-year-old online fashion heavyweight, and his assistant Yozo Hirano landed on Monday, December 20 after spending 12 days in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) . The landing took place at 4:13 am (French time) in the steppe of Kazakhstan.

They were accompanied on the way back and on the way by the Russian cosmonaut Alexander Missurkin. “Flight of ‘tourist’ Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft is over”Roscosmos said in a statement posted on his site. “The crew is feeling good”, said a Nasa TV commentator.

His assistant made videos on daily life in orbit for the billionaire’s YouTube account. We can see the man explaining in detail to his million followers how to brush his teeth or even go to the toilet in zero gravity. “Peeing is very easy”, he says in one of the videos, showing the tool astronauts use to suck urine. In another, he makes himself a tea without sugar and praises the tasty cookies of the ISS.

This trip marks the return of Russia to space tourism, after more than ten years of absence, awhen the Russian aerospace industry is plagued by corruption scandals and technical and financial difficulties. In 2020, with the commissioning of SpaceX rockets and capsules, Moscow lost its monopoly on manned flights to the ISS and the tens of millions of euros that NASA and other space agencies were paying for each seat in edge of Soyuz.


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