Returning from a twelve-day stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa on Wednesday encouraged world elites to also indulge in weightless tourism.

"I would like as many people as possible and as many powerful and influential people as possible to go to space," Yusaku Maezawa said at a press conference at the cosmonaut preparation center near Moscow.

"They will see the Earth differently and treat it differently," he added, according to comments in Japanese translated into Russian.

Take advantage of the financial windfall of space tourism

Alongside his assistant Yozo Hirano, Yusaku Maezawa, an entrepreneur who made his fortune in online fashion, spent 12 days in the ISS in December where he recounted on video his life in space for his million subscribers on YouTube.

Accompanied by cosmonaut Alexandre Missourkine, the two Japanese returned to Earth on Monday aboard a Soyuz capsule from the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which seeks to take advantage of the financial windfall of space tourism, in full revival.

A trip around the Moon in 2023?

The wealthy Japanese 46-year-old estimated that the "ideal length" of a tourist stay in the ISS would rather be twenty days, in order to have time to better adapt to life in weightlessness.

Yusaku Maezawa also reaffirmed Wednesday his next dream: to travel around the moon in 2023, with eight other people aboard a spacecraft from the SpaceX group.

The very lucrative private space flight sector is currently being boosted by the entry into the race of the companies of American billionaires Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), as well as that of the British Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) .

Science

Aurora borealis, hole in the ISS… Thomas Pesquet looks back on his astronaut experiences

Science

NASA unveils the ten people selected to become its new astronauts

  • Space

  • Video

  • Japan

  • World

  • ISS

  • 0 comment

  • 0 share

    • Share on Messenger

    • Share on Facebook

    • Share on twitter

    • Share on Flipboard

    • Share on Pinterest

    • Share on Linkedin

    • Send by Mail

  • To safeguard

  • A fault ?

  • To print