A Russian Soyuz spacecraft is due to take a Japanese billionaire to the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, a trip that honors Moscow’s efforts to establish itself in the lucrative orbiting tourism market.
This flight, which will depart from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, comes at a crucial time for the Russian aerospace industry, which has been undermined for years by scandals and faced with competition from private American players.
Last year, billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX company began taking passengers to the ISS, ending the lucrative monopoly that the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) had previously held.
Roscosmos therefore hopes to open a new chapter by sending on the ISS the whimsical Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, 46 years old and who made his fortune in online fashion, and his assistant Yozo Hirano on the ISS.
The aircraft will be piloted by a veteran Russian cosmonaut, Alexander Missurkin, who has already carried out two missions aboard the ISS.
The two Japanese tourists will stay 12 days aboard the orbital station, where they plan to shoot videos that will be published on the billionaire’s YouTube channel, which has more than 750,000 subscribers.
“I almost want to cry, it’s so impressive,” Mr. Maezawa said when he arrived at the Baikonur Cosmodrome at the end of November.
Maezawa also said he has a “list of almost 100 tasks” he wants to accomplish aboard the station, including playing badminton in space.
For several weeks, the two Japanese trained in Star City, a city built near Moscow in the 1960s to train generations of Soviet and now Russian cosmonauts.
Adorned with a Japanese flag, the Soyuz spacecraft which is to take them into space was taken to the firing point on Sunday morning under a rainy sky, noted an AFP journalist.
Multiplication of flights
This mission, organized by Roscosmos and its American partner Space Adventures, will mark Russia’s return to the space tourism race, after more than a decade of hiatus.
Roscosmos and Space Adventures had already collaborated between 2001 and 2009 to send extremely wealthy entrepreneurs into space eight times. The most recent was the founder of Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian Guy Laliberté.
The trip of the two Japanese comes at a time when private flights in space multiply.
In September, SpaceX staged a historic three-day orbit flight with an all-amateur crew.
Symbol of the growing ambitions related to space, Elon Musk’s company plans to take several tourists around the moon in 2023. Mr. Maezawa, who finances this operation, will also be on the trip.
Other private players are also in the ranks, such as the company Blue Origin of the founder of Amazon, the American billionaire Jeff Bezos, which organized two trips. Or Virgin Galactic, by British billionaire Richard Branson, who took a flight in zero gravity in July.
Moscow, which competed with the United States for the conquest of space during the Cold War, seems determined to regain its rank as a leading space power after years of disappointment.
Corruption scandals, budget cuts and embarrassing technical problems have indeed tarnished the reputation of the sector.
As a sign of its desire for a facelift, Roscosmos sent in October a director and an actress aboard the ISS to shoot the first feature film in history in orbit, before a competing project by Tom Cruise.
The Russian space agency has also indicated that it will take more tourists on its missions to the ISS, and even plans to organize a spacewalk in space.