A little while ago, the Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft reached the International Space Station. It blasted off about six hours earlier from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, with three people on board. It’s a mission totally oriented towards space tourism set up by the private company Space Adventures in a deal with the Russian space agency Roscosmos. For this reason, the Soyuz MS-20 will return to Earth on December 20.
Generally, Soyuz spacecraft carry International Space Station crew members on their rotation. In this case, the mission is very special because cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin traveled together with Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and Yozo Hirano, who will be in charge of documenting this tourist mission.
Alexander Alexanderovich Misurkin. Born on September 23, 1977, in Yershichi, Smolensk Oblast, then USSR, now in Russia, studied at Kacha High Air Force Pilot School to continue his training as a pilot at the Armavir Military Aviation Institute graduating in 1999 as a pilot-engineer with a gold medal. He served as a pilot instructor and air commander until 2006 when he was selected as a cosmonaut candidate. He has already served on the International Space Station in 2013 as part of Expedition 35/36 until September 2013 conducting 3 spacewalks and as part of Expedition 53/54 that ended on February 28, 2018. He’s married and has two children.
Space Adventures is a company that opened in 1998 to offer space travel tours, although it does include atmospheric flights that simulate the microgravity of space in its offerings. Prior to the Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft mission, seven tourists made trips to the International Space Station, where they stayed for a few days.
In the years when the Soyuz spacecraft were the only ones carrying people to the Station, it had become almost impossible to buy a “ticket” even paying many millions of dollars. The situation changed considerably after SpaceX’s Crew Dragon entered service. Now it’s been possible to set up a space mission for the sole purpose of sending billionaire Yusaku Maezawa into space together with another person, Yozo Hirano, who can document his journey. Basically, veteran cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin works on this mission as a space taxi driver.
In 2018, the announcement came that Yusaku Maezawa will be the first passenger on a private journey around the Moon with SpaceX. If the journey does happen, it will not be on a Crew Dragon but likely on a Starship, which is currently in development. Evidently, Maezawa decided not to wait any more years to go to space and made a deal with Space Adventures for this journey to the International Space Station.
