JAPANESE billionaire Yusaku Maezawa said he is feeling “excited” ahead of his mission to the International Space Station (ISS), which marks the return to space tourism for Russia.

Maezawa, a space enthusiast who made his wealth in online fashion, and his production assistant, Yozo Hirano, will spend 12 days on the ISS.

Their Soyuz rocket operated by Russia’s Roscosmos space agency will blast off from the Moscow-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan tomorrow.

“I feel excited. I am like an elementary student waiting for a school trip,” said the tycoon at a press conference on the eve of the launch.

“I want to see the earth from space. I want to float in zero gravity… (I want to see) how I will change through this experience.”

Maezawa and Hirano plan to document their daily life on board the space station for the former’s YouTube channel and its more than 750,000 subscribers.

Maezawa said he has a list of 100 tasks to complete while he is there.

Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin, who will pilot the pair’s spacecraft, said the group’s time on the ISS will be busy and described it as a “challenge”.

The group will hold a “friendly” badminton tournament on the space station before returning to Earth on December 20, he added.

Maezawa and Hirano will become the first space tourists sent by Russia in over a decade, and the first from Japan to visit the ISS.

With SpaceX now able to ferry Nasa astronauts in Crew Dragon capsules to the ISS, Roscosmos has seats to fill on its Soyuz launches and has been ramping up civilian journeys this year.

Roscosmos sent an actress and a director to the station in October, where they filmed scenes for the first movie in orbit. – AFP, December 7, 2021.