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Baikonur, Kazakhstan A Japanese billionaire arrived at the International Space Station on Wednesday, marking Russia’s return to space tourism after a decade-long pause that saw the rise of competition from the United States.
Online fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan before on Wednesday They docked with the Poisk module of the Russian member of the ISS at 1340 GMT, the Russian space agency said.
A Roscosmos livefeed showed the door of the Soyuz MS-20 capsule open at 1611 GMT, showing Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin entering the ISS, followed by Maezawa and Hirano Their trip aboard the three-person Soyuz spacecraft piloted by Misurkin took just over six hours, circumscribing a banner time that numerous have seen as a turning point for private space trip.
As the doors opened, the triad floated into the orbital station where they were saluted by Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Petr Dubrov The station is presently home to an transnational crew of seven people Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson all made advance marketable tourism breakouts this time, bursting into a request Russia is keen to defend A crowd at the launch point– including Maezawa’s family and musketeers– brazened nipping temperatures and cheered as the rocket blasted off into the slate sky, leaving a trail of orange dears before fading in the shadows.
“This has been a long process. It’s so moving. I was about to cry,” said Ryo Okubo, a counsel for Maezawa’s space systems “I am really agitated but he is also my friend so I am upset about him,”a longtime friend of the billionaire, 44- time-old Hiroyuki Sugimoto, told AFP The triad will spend 12 days on the station where the Japanese excursionists will validate their diurnal life aboard the ISS for Maezawa’s popular YouTube channel.
The 46- time-old billionaire has set out 100 tasks to complete onboard, including hosting a badminton event Maezawa also plans to take eight people with him on a 2023 charge around the moon operated by Musk’s SpaceX He and his adjunct are the first private Japanese citizens to visit space since intelligencer Toyohiro Akiyama travelled to the Mir station in 1990 Russia has a history of tutoring tone- funded excursionists to space In cooperation with US- grounded company Space Adventures, Roscosmos preliminarily took seven excursionists to the ISS since 2001– one of them doubly.
-‘ Veritably patient and creative’-
The last was Canada’s Cirque du Soleilco-founder Guy Laliberte in 2009, who was dubbed the first zany in space Tom Shelley, chairman of Space Adventures, praised Russia’s return to the booming space tourism business It’s been 12 times. We have had to be veritably patient. We have had to be veritably creative. So, this is the capstone of a lot of trouble from a lot of different people,”he told AFP shortly after takeoff.
In October, Russia launched its first untrained cosmonauts into space since Laliberte’s trip, delivering a Russian actress and director to the ISS where they mugged scenes for the first movie in route Moscow had stopped transferring excursionists to space after NASA retired its Space Shuttle in 2011, which left Russia with a monopoly on supplying the ISS.
NASA bought up all Soyuz launch seats for a reported$ 90 million per spot– effectively ending sightseer breakouts That changed last time when a SpaceX spacecraft successfully delivered its first astronauts to the ISS NASA began copping breakouts from SpaceX, stripping Russia of its monopoly and going its cash-strapped space agency millions of bones in profit.
While the cost of tickets to space for excursionists has not been bared, Space Adventures has indicated that they’re in the range of$ 50-60 million Roscosmos plans to continue growing its space tourism business, formerly commissioning two Soyuz rockets for similar passages We’ll not give away this niche to the Americans. We’re ready to fight for it,”Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin said after the launch He told journalists that Russia has entered two operations for unborn space breakouts and a group of implicit trippers is formerly working at the cosmonaut training centre.
“I can say that this is a Russian group,”he added.
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