YUSAKU MAEZAWA is done with his time in space. The whimsical Japanese billionaire, accompanied by his assistant Yozo Hirano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Missurkin, has landed after spending 12 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS). “The flight of the spaceship ‘touristic’ Soyuz MS-20 is finished,” Russian space agency Roscosmos said in a statement posted on its website. The landing was made at around 4:13 a.m. yesterday in the steppe of Kazakhstan. Footage from the landing site, about 150 kilometers southeast of the city of Zhezkazgan in central Kazakhstan, showed the trio smiling after being helped out of the Soyuz descent module and into vehicles evacuation, in the cold and the mist. “The crew feels good,” said a NASA TV commentator, translating comments from Russian Mission Control. According to the press service of the Central Military District, they were to be greeted on arrival with a dish of noodles from Japan. The 46-year-old Japanese billionaire, an online fashion heavyweight, has set himself a list of 100 tasks to accomplish while on the ISS. Maezawa’s assistant made videos on daily life in orbit for the billionaire’s YouTube account. We can see the man explaining in detail to his million followers how to brush his teeth or even go to the toilet in zero gravity. “Peeing is very easy,” he says in one of the videos, showing the tool astronauts use to suck urine. In another, he makes himself a tea without sugar and praises the tasty cookies of the ISS. The trip marks Russia’s return to space tourism after a decade-long hiatus. Maezawa and his assistant are the first Japanese tourists to space since 1990, when a reporter stayed aboard the Soviet Mir station. The very lucrative private space flight sector is currently being boosted by the recent 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) . In September, SpaceX hosted a three-day orbit flight with an all-amateur crew. She also plans to take several tourists around the moon in 2023, including Maezawa, who is funding this operation. This return to the Roscosmos arena comes as Russia’s aerospace industry is plagued by corruption scandals and technical and financial difficulties. In 2020, with the commissioning of SpaceX rockets and capsules, Moscow lost its monopoly on manned flights to the ISS and the tens of millions of euros that NASA and other space agencies were paying for each seat in edge of the Soyuz. (SD-Agencies) | 