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Maezawa climbs out of the Soyuz MS-20 capsule shortly after landing
Photo: ROSCOSMOS PRESS SERVICE / HANDOUT / EPA
After more than ten days in space, two Japanese space tourists have safely returned to Earth from the International Space Station.
The space capsule with the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano landed on Monday morning as planned in the steppes of the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan, as the Russian space agency Roskosmos announced.
Also on board was the cosmonaut Alexander Missurkin, who had already accompanied the two at take-off.
They are all fine, said Roscosmos.
On December 8, Russia flew tourists to the ISS for the first time in twelve years.
The three space travelers were launched from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.
Recordings from Roscosmos now showed a landing of the returnees in good weather.
The two Japanese smiled happily at the cameras.
Maezawa had documented his stay on the ISS with videos that he published on his YouTube channel.
His assistant filmed him sleeping, brushing his teeth and drinking tea, among other things.
According to Forbes magazine, 46-year-old Maezawa is one of the 30 richest people in Japan with private assets of around 1.7 billion euros.
The entrepreneur made his money mainly from selling clothes on the Internet via the »Zozotown« website, which was founded in 2004.
It is not known how much the two Japanese paid for the flight to the ISS.
The costs per person are estimated at between 44 million and 53 million euros.
Private individuals on board the station around 400 kilometers above the ground have been rare in recent years. Roscosmos has transported nine tourists since 2009. One reason for the low number of private flights, besides the high costs, is that the Russian rockets have taken US astronauts to the ISS for many years. That changed last year when the US company SpaceX, headed by Tesla founder Elon Musk, ended the Russian monopoly on manned flights to the ISS with its "Crew Dragon" spaceship.
But only recently, a Russian film team was on the space station, including an actress and a director, to shoot a feature film in space. The team had twelve days to shoot at the human outpost. “Wysow”, challenge, is the working title of the film, for which the film crew had undergone several weeks of cosmonaut training.
In the future, Roskosmos wants to bring private individuals into space more often and earn money with them, since there have been free spaces in the Russian Soyuz capsules.
But Russia now has to fight to keep up with Western competitors.
In September SpaceX undertook the first purely tourist flight in Earth orbit with its three-day mission "Inspiration4".
SpaceX is preparing to orbit the moon with eight amateur astronauts for 2023.
Maezawa also wants to be on board again.
Blue Origin, the company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, completed two missions outside of the earth's atmosphere.
And billionaire Richard Branson also experienced a few minutes of weightlessness with a spaceship belonging to his company Virgin Galactic.
joe / dpa / AFP
