A Japanese billionaire left for space today with a Russian rocket and will stay for twelve days on the International Space Station (ISS), on a journey that marks the return of Russia to space tourism.
This sector, in which Russia has lost ground to private American companies, especially SpaceX, is gaining new interest and is a potential financial mother.
The eccentric 46-year-old Yusaku Mezawa, who made a fortune by trading fashion items on the Internet, and his assistant, Yozo Hirano, took off from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 09:38 (Greek time), as scheduled.
The flight inside the space capsule is expected to last six hours and the spacecraft is expected to dock at the Russian section of the ISS at 15:41 (Greek time).
In the morning, the billionaire, his assistant and cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin, who will be Soyuz's pilot, left their hotel in Baikonur with smiles to the sound of a Soviet song traditionally heard by all cosmonauts before space flight. This song - for cosmonauts who miss their home - was sung in part in Japanese.
"Dreams come true," Mezawa wrote on Twitter this morning.
"I'm very excited, but as a true friend, I'm worried about him," Hiroyuki Sugimoto, who says he has known the billionaire for 17 years and came to Baikonur to see him, told AFP before takeoff. flies into space.
The two space tourists will spend 12 days inside the space station, a stay that Yozo Chirano will record on YouTube on behalf of Mezawa and with him.
Cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin said his comrades would have a busy schedule. He has planned a "friendly" badminton tournament with them in conditions of weightlessness.
The billionaire has set for himself 100 things he will have to accomplish in space.
For several weeks, he and his assistant had been training in the Star City, built in the 1960s near Moscow to train generations of cosmonauts.
There are currently seven people on the ISS, including two Russians and a Japanese man.
Source: RES - EIA