The whimsical 46-year-old businessman, who made his fortune in online fashion, will take his seat in the Soyuz rocket on Wednesday morning with his assistant Yozo Hirano and cosmonaut Alexandre Missourkine.
The two Japanese will then spend 12 days aboard the ISS.
"I am excited, like a child before a class trip," Maezawa said at a press conference in Baikonur, a Russian cosmodrome in Kazakhstan from where it will take off on Wednesday.
"I really want to see the Earth from Space, to have the zero gravity experience, of how space is changing people, how I am going to change after this flight," he added.
During the 12 days, Mr. Hirano will have to document in video the stay of the two men and their interactions on board the ISS.
The billionaire has set a list of 100 tasks he wants to accomplish.
Cosmonaut Alexandre Missourkine, who will pilot Soyuz, judged that his companions will have a busy schedule: "it will be a challenge to do everything".
He has planned a "friendly" weightless badminton tournament with the space tourists.
This flight comes at a crucial time for the Russian aerospace industry, plagued for years by scandals and competing with private American players, including Space X by billionaire Elon Musk who is now ferrying passengers to the ISS and has launched in space tourism.
In the 2000s, Russia, in partnership with the company Space Adventures, had already sold seats on board Soyuz to extremely wealthy personalities, but it had been more than a decade since it had organized such tourist flights. .
In addition, Russia dispatched a director and actress to the ISS in October to shoot the first feature-length film in orbit history, a shoot intended to compete with a similar project on loan to Tom Cruise.
© 2021 AFP