Russia posted, Thursday, May 13, these new ambitions in space with two consecutive announcements, while the Roscosmos space agency has struggled for years and is trying to revive after corruption scandals and competition from the Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
First, she announced Thursday that she intended to send Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano, responsible for documenting the adventure, to the International Space Station (ISS). The trip is scheduled for December 8 aboard a Soyuz rocket. “The duration of the space trip will be twelve days”, the agency commented, adding that crew training would begin in June.
“I’m so curious about life in space that I planned to experience it on my own and share it with the world on my YouTube channel”, Yusaku Maezawa, 45, commented in a press release from Space Adventures, the intermediary who organizes the trip.
The “first fictional film in space”
In addition, Roscosmos has also announced that it will send, in October, actress Yulia Peressild, 36, and director Klim Chipenko, 37, aboard the ISS to shoot there. “The first fictional film in space”, a work of which we only know the working title, “Le Défi”.
“The departure of the expedition is scheduled for October 5, 2021 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft”, according to Roscosmos. The film is a « drame spatial », still according to the Russian space agency and will be directed by Mr. Chipenko, author of the Russian films « Kholop », ” Toliout-7 » and « Text ».
The feature film is co-produced by Dmitri Rogozin, the boss of Roscosmos, who wants Russia to be the first to carry out such a project, while NASA is working with Tom Cruise on the same type of project.
The announcement of the resumption of tourist expeditions to the ISS comes as Russia lost, in 2020, the monopoly on manned flights it had held since 2011. Since May 2020, SpaceX rockets and capsules have been able to ‘send astronauts to the station, thus securing contracts from NASA and Europe. A shortfall of tens of millions of dollars per seat for Russia.
Roscosmos and Space Adventures had already collaborated between 2001 and 2009 to send, on eight occasions, extremely wealthy entrepreneurs in space, the latest of which was the founder of Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian Guy Laliberté. The Japanese billionaire who will succeed him has made a fortune in online commerce. A space enthusiast, he has even already planned a next trip around the Moon, in 2023, with the aerospace company of Elon Musk.
A project of a Russian space station
Neither Space Adventures nor Roscosmos have revealed the amount that Yusaku Maezawa will spend to reserve two of the three seats of the Soyuz capsule. But, according to the specialist magazine Forbes, well introduced in the entourage of billionaires, a seat is billed between 20 and 35 million dollars for eight to twelve days aboard the orbital station.
In addition to space tourism and cinema, the boss of Roscosmos, Dmitri Rogozine, has promised to revive his country with a series of ambitious projects. The latest would be to abandon the ISS 2025 on the horizon to build a strictly Russian space station.
Moscow and Beijing have also signed a memorandum of understanding to build a station in orbit or even on the moon, Russia having decided to slam the door of a lunar project in Washington deemed too focused on the United States. None of these projects has a specific budget or timetable yet.
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